Research Article / Original Article
Hossein Kachooyan; Mohsen Saboorian
Abstract
It is now more than two centuries that social scientist, Orientalists, historians and Muslim thinkers had been paying special attention to Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun. Interpreters of Ibn Khaldun tried to classify his thoughts in some pre-existing categories, such as Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical ...
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It is now more than two centuries that social scientist, Orientalists, historians and Muslim thinkers had been paying special attention to Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun. Interpreters of Ibn Khaldun tried to classify his thoughts in some pre-existing categories, such as Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical and political traditions, Nationalism, or Comtian modern sociology. These classifications, not only dismiss the whole content of Muqaddimah, reducing it to positive Comtian sociology or a contribution to sciences of the medieval ages, but also disregard the structure of internal content of Muqaddimah, which itself objects to these readings to a great extent. In this paper we critically examined three well-known interpretations which overall considered epistemological, sociological and historical aspects of Muqaddimah. We then argued how one can interpret Muqaddimah in direct opposition with the original text. Seyed Javad Tabatabaei, in respect to his 'decline theory' of Muslims thought demonstrates the work of Ibn Khaldun as insufficient and incapable of forming major epistemological shift in Muslims though. In this regard, he names some historical points in the western thought and highlights lack of their counterparts in Muslims’ thoughts, a method we shall call 'reverse engineering of history'. Muhsin Mahdi and Taha Hussein, who are renowned world-wide, analyzed Muqaddimah from classical Islamic philosophy and Arabic nationalism points of view and shed light on some part of its truth in the cost of dismissing the rest.
