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Reading Ibn Khaldun through the Lens of Rights

A graduate student recently observed that my sustained focus on human rights—evident from my Ph.D. dissertation on property and inheritance rights through my subsequent publications—might make my current engagement with Ibn Khaldun appear to mark a significant shift in scholarly direction. This is a fair and thoughtful observation, and one that calls for a clear response.

In truth, it took me more than two decades to fully recognize that human rights have always been the underlying axis of my scholarship: the steady thread connecting projects that span over a millennium of human history. My first book examined women’s rights in Islamic societies; my second explored dissent and rebellion, with particular attention to Ibadism—the only Islamic tradition that explicitly grounds political legitimacy in justice. My third work addressed human rights discourse more directly, tracing its evolution through both the Enlightenment’s enduring legacy and modern Islamic thought. Viewed in this light, my turn to Ibn Khaldun does not represent a departure from earlier concerns, but rather a deepening of them—a move toward more foundational questions about the very possibility of universal rights.

If anything can meaningfully be described as a universal right—and I remain convinced that some rights can—then universality must be demonstrated, not merely asserted. It is difficult to sustain the claim that human beings possess inalienable rights in the abstract if those rights leave no discernible trace in historical experience: if they were never articulated, contested, or implicitly recognized across diverse societies and epochs. This is not to suggest that historical recognition constitutes the source of a right, but rather that historical traceability is essential to establishing its claim to universality. A right that cannot, in principle, be grounded across time and culture risks collapsing into a culturally bounded moral preference rather than a genuinely universal human claim.

For this reason, inquiry into the deep past is not optional—it is indispensable. The tendency among some Western scholars to treat human rights as a purely modern, Western invention—rather than as claims with deeper human antecedents—ultimately undermines their own arguments for universality. If rights are merely the products of a specific historical moment, their global applicability becomes conceptually fragile.

A second, equally compelling consideration led me decisively toward classical Islamic—and broader premodern—thought. Human rights cannot endure if they remain confined to the level of moral assertion or legal proclamation. To function as more than rhetorical gestures, rights must rest on a universal principle capable of grounding human dignity and worth regardless of legal regime, cultural tradition, or historical context. Identifying such a principle demands an inquiry that is both deep and wide—one that penetrates beneath normative language to the very conditions that make claims of right intelligible, contestable, and socially resonant.

My engagement with Ibn Khaldun—particularly in contrast with earlier strands of classical Islamic thought—convinced me that if such a principle exists, it is most likely to be articulated by a thinker who moves beyond religious ethics alone to uncover the governing logic of social life itself. Ibn Khaldun does not offer a theory of rights in the modern sense, nor does he frame his analysis in moralistic or juridical terms. Instead, he seeks to understand the forces through which human societies generate value, sustain cohesion, and ultimately flourish or decay. It is precisely this analytic posture—his focus on the structural and historical dynamics of social life—that renders his thought indispensable for rethinking the foundations of human rights.

Engaging Ibn Khaldun has opened new horizons for rights discourse—one in which universality is not secured primarily through legal codification or moral consensus, but through the identification of a fundamental human activity capable of anchoring claims of dignity and worth across civilizations. In this sense, Ibn Khaldun provides a vital bridge between contemporary human rights discourse and deeper, transhistorical principles that precede—and may well outlast—modern legal formulations.

This expanded intellectual horizon has inevitably required me to revisit and revise certain conclusions from my earlier work. Such revision reflects not inconsistency, but scholarly growth. Conclusions drawn within a limited evidentiary frame must be reassessed as that frame widens. What remains constant, however, is my central concern with rights—not as abstract ideals, but as claims that must be rooted in the realities of human social existence. Readers should therefore understand my work as shaped by a sustained commitment: to identify the conditions under which claims of right can be meaningfully universalized, rather than merely declared.

Ahmed E. Souaiaia

University of Iowa

 

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Knowledge in the Shadow of Power

Ibn Khaldun and the Systems of Intellectual Survival By Ahmed E. Souaiaia Abstract This article examines Ibn Khaldun’s striking praise of political authority in the introduction to al-Muqaddima , arguing that it reflects neither hypocrisy nor routine courtly convention, but a historically informed strategy shaped by the structural conditions of knowledge preservation. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the state ( al-dawla ) as an emergent system grounded in ʿumrān —a concept encompassing social cohesion and civilizational development—as well as patronage and institutional continuity, the article demonstrates that knowledge production is inseparable from power. By situating Ibn Khaldun’s choices alongside earlier episodes of intellectual suppression, most notably the fate of Ibn Rushd, and his own experiences of political instability, exile, and imprisonment, proximity to power is reframed as calculated accommodation rather than ideological submission. Extending the analysis to the pre...
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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...
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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...
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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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The Bridge of Becoming: Reimagining Work and Capital through Ibn Khaldun and Western Economic Thought

 Abstract This study reimagines the foundational role of work in economic life through a comparative analysis of Ibn Khaldun and key Western economic thinkers, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Max Weber, and John Maynard Keynes. Drawing on the Systems Thinking Framework, the research positions work not merely as an economic activity but as a structuring principle that shapes civilizations, value systems, and social organization. Unlike modern paradigms that prioritize capital accumulation, this study explores how Ibn Khaldun’s pre-Enlightenment perspective centers work as the original and enduring source of value, production, and moral order. By contrasting this with Western theories that progressively decouple wealth from labor, the paper proposes a re-evaluation of economic systems toward a more equitable, sustainable, and human-centered model. The study also underscores the determinant role of the State in shaping dominant worldviews, offering a critical perspective on the i...
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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...
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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...
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