History as Empirical Science

Ibn Khaldun opens his historical corpus with a critique of previous historians who accepted and transmitted reports uncritically, including obvious impossibilities. His own criterion is what he calls the "touchstone" of historical credibility: a report about the past must be assessed not only by the reliability of its chain of transmission (the isnad, the standard Islamic method of hadith authentication) but also by its conformity to what the science of civilisation tells us is naturally possible. An army of millions, a mountain of gold, a king who ruled for a thousand years — these fail the touchstone regardless of the authority of the sources reporting them.

The Kitāb al-ʿIbar is a vehicle for "lessons" (ʿibar) — concrete historical examples that illustrate and test the theoretical principles of the Muqaddimah. The history of the Arabs, the Berbers, and the great Islamic dynasties provides the empirical material from which Ibn Khaldun derived his generalisations, and the history in turn is illuminated by the theoretical framework. Each dynastic rise and fall becomes an instance of the civilisational laws at work; each economic crisis or cultural flowering illustrates a principle about the relationship between ʿaṣabiyya, luxury, and collective survival.

Ibn Khaldun draws on his own extraordinary biography — diplomat, judge, hostage, exile, statesman — to give his history an empirical immediacy that distinguishes it from purely bookish scholarship. He was present at the fall of dynasties, negotiated with conquerors, and witnessed the devastation of the Black Death across North Africa. This personal experience of civilisational fragility gives the Kitāb al-ʿIbar its peculiar authority: it is history written by a man who understood, from the inside, what it means for a civilisation to be strong and what it means for one to be dying.

The Kitāb al-ʿIbar was completed in 1382. Ibn Khaldun continued to revise it until his death in Cairo in 1406. The autobiographical sections, which describe his extraordinary career, are the most personal of his writings and a primary source for the political history of fourteenth-century North Africa.