Ibn Khaldun Today

On Civilizational Cyclicality by Ahmed E. Souaiaia, PhD  Introduction Recent commentary in policy and journalistic circles, typified by essays such as The New York Times piece titled “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” interprets the contemporary geopolitical moment through the lens of strategic errors, imperial overreach, and episodic miscalculation. Within this framing, hypothetical or proximate conflicts, including discursive references to the 2026 war on Iran, are positioned as decisive inflection points that accelerate or reveal systemic deterioration. Such accounts capture visible strain but remain analytically confined to event-centric and state-centric logics. They presuppose that decline is triggered rather than emergent, that empire is an attribute of a nation-state rather than a structural condition of a broader configuration, and that capacity, whether military, economic, or technological, constitutes the primary metric of systemic vitality. When examined thr...

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...

Feng Jiewen’s article,  A Survey of Research on Ibn Khaldun’s Socio-Historical Philosophy since the 19th Century, offers a comprehensive and carefully structured survey of more than a century and a half of scholarship on Ibn Khaldun’s socio-historical philosophy. Drawing on a broad corpus of European, Middle Eastern, and Chinese academic works, the author maps the development of Ibn Khaldun studies from early manuscript collection and translation projects to contemporary, specialized analyses of his intellectual legacy. As a review essay, the article succeeds in presenting both the breadth of international research and the relative gaps within Chinese scholarship.