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Ibn Khaldun in Contemporary Scholarship

Rethinking a Complex Worldview Across Economics, Sociology, and Philosophy Abstract Recent decades have witnessed a striking resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century North African thinker long celebrated yet insufficiently theorized. Although often described as the founder of sociology or an early political economist, Ibn Khaldun developed a far more comprehensive and internally coherent system for understanding human civilization, one that linked economics, social cohesion, moral psychology, urban development, historical cycles, and statecraft within a single conceptual architecture. Modern scholarship, however, has often treated Ibn Khaldun selectively, isolating one or two concepts—asabiyya, state cycles, taxation—without appreciating the systemic totality of his thought. This article surveys recent works on Ibn Khaldun. Taken together, these works reveal both the richness of Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual legacy and the persistent gaps...

Situating Ibn Khaldun and the Meaning of Civilization in Modern Scholarship

The study of civilization has long oscillated between two dominant approaches: one that treats civilizations as culturally bounded, historically plural entities, and another that emphasizes systemic integration, structural dominance, and global convergence. Ibn Khaldun and the Meaning of Civilization enters this field by reconstructing Ibn Khaldun’s concepts of ʿumrān and ḥaḍāra as a unified analytical framework capable of resolving tensions that have persisted across modern civilizational theory. Rather than offering a rebuttal to any single school, the article reframes the problem itself: it argues that much contemporary disagreement stems from a categorical confusion between culture, identity, and civilization. Modern civilizational scholarship has been shaped decisively by works that emphasize plurality. From Oswald Spengler’s organicist vision of multiple, self-contained civilizations, to Arnold J. Toynbee’s comparative study of civilizational rise and decline, the dominant p...

Prosperity, Affordability, and ʿasabiyya

The recent emergence of “affordability” as a dominant term in American political discourse is neither accidental nor merely rhetorical. Its rapid ascent followed the inflationary shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascading economic disruptions that accompanied it: housing instability, supply-chain fragmentation, stagnant real wages, and the widening gap between nominal income and the cost of living. However, the political salience of affordability extends beyond macroeconomic indicators. Its growing prominence signals a deeper structural shift: the search for a new conceptual system capable of restoring coherence between governing institutions and the lived material realities of citizens. What registers on the surface as a policy priority or campaign slogan may therefore reflect a more consequential transformation in the conceptual foundations through which political legitimacy and collective social purpose are organized. Such a shift cannot be adequately captured through ...

Ibn Khaldun and Auguste Comte: a Comparative Analysis of the Founding Figures of Sociology

by Sayeda Akhter, PhD, Md. and Ashif Hasan Razu ABSTRACT: This paper presents a comparative analysis of the contributions of Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab scholar, and Auguste Comte, a 19th-century French philosopher, to the development of sociology. While Auguste Comte is widely acknowledged in the Western tradition as the “father of sociology,” Ibn Khaldun’s seminal work, “Muqaddimah”, place the Preliminary work for a systematic approach to social and historical analysis several centuries before Comte. Ibn Khaldun’s pioneering ideas on social cohesion, economic foundations, and the cyclical nature of civilizations challenge the conventional Eurocentric narrative that places the origins of sociological thought exclusively within Western intellectual history. This paper examines the methodologies, theories, and socio-historical contexts that shaped the works of both thinkers. Ibn Khaldun’s empirical observations and his concept of “asabiyyah” (social cohesion) are compared with...

Ibn Khaldun’s Systems Thinking Approach to Property and Political Legitimacy

Abstract This article examines Ibn Khaldun’s foundational economic principle that active human work—expressed through the ever-present, transformative agency of the hand ( yad )—produces rightful ownership ( kasb ) that cannot be surrendered except through compensation ( ʿiwaḍ ). This dynamic relationship between labor, possession, and reciprocal exchange not only legitimates individual property but also establishes the systemic conditions under which the State may impose taxes without descending into injustice. In grounding political and fiscal legitimacy in the natural processes of human work rather than in inherited legal categories, Ibn Khaldun articulates a worldview that sets him apart from classical Muslim jurists and places him in a category of his own within Islamic intellectual history. This same systems-thinking framework—through which he analyzes value, authority, and historical change—has rendered him profoundly misunderstood or entirely un-understood by many modern scho...

The Grammar of Systems Thinking in Ibn Khaldun’s Writings

Ibn Khaldun’s Systemic Language in the Muqaddima Ahmed E. Souaiaia, University of Iowa Here, I examine Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima through what I call the grammar of systems thinking, arguing that his writings exhibit a sophisticated systemic logic articulated through language, method, and explanatory practice rather than through formal theory. Addressing the common anachronism objection—that identifying Ibn Khaldun as a systems thinker projects a modern framework onto a pre-modern author—the cited evidence demonstrates that Ibn Khaldun consistently employed a vocabulary and analytical structure grounded in order (tartīb), rules (aḥkām), causality (asbāb and musabbabāt), connection (ittiṣāl), organization (intidām), and instrumentalization (istidhār)—some of the key principles of the systems thinking framework. His concepts function together as a coherent grammar governing his explanations of natural phenomena, human action, economic activity, and political power. Ibn Khaldun integrates co...

Processing Theory in Islamic Thought

In " Processing Theory in Islamic Thought: A Comparative Analysis of al-Mawardi and Ibn Khaldun with Implications for Islamic Education ," published in the November 2025 issue of Tadibia Islamika, Muhammad Farid Asysyauqi undertakes a sophisticated re-examination of medieval Islamic scholarship through the lens of modern cognitive psychology. The article moves beyond the traditional bifurcation of al-Mawardi as merely a jurist and Ibn Khaldun as solely a sociologist, positing instead that both scholars constructed intricate theories of information processing that prefigure contemporary educational psychology. By employing Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA) to dissect classical texts like Adab al-Dunya wa al-Din and al-Muqaddimah, Asysyauqi constructs a compelling narrative that bridges the gap between twelfth-century theology and twenty-first-century information processing theory. The narrative begins with al-Mawardi, whose contribution is reframed from simple moral instruction ...

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