Ibn Khaldun Today

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...

In his 2005 article, “ Theorizing from Within: Ibn Khaldun and His Political Culture ,” anthropologist Lawrence Rosen offers a nuanced and culturally grounded critique of the dominant Western reception of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). Rather than celebrating the North African polymath as a proto-sociologist or an early architect of grand historical theory—an approach common among both Orientalist and postcolonial scholars—Rosen insists that Ibn Khaldun must be understood first and foremost as an Arab-Muslim thinker whose theoretical insights emerged from, and were inseparable from, the specific political and cultural milieu of his time. This essay reviews Rosen’s central arguments, evaluates his methodological contribution, and situates his intervention within broader debates about cross-cultural intellectual history and the politics of comparative theory. Rosen’s primary concern is with what he sees as a persistent misreading of Ibn Khaldun in Western scholarship. Too often, he argues, Ibn...