ABSTRACT
It seems an odd coincidence that from 1930 to 1932 there should have appeared four different studies devoted to the work of Ibn Khaldun, considering that in the half century following the issue of de Slane's translation of the Muqaddima, 1 apart from von Kremer's study 2 and a few short articles drawing the attention of a wider circle of students in various countries to its significance, it was not until 1917 that the first monograph on the subject was published by Dr. Taha Husain. 3 This work, like most of the earlier articles, dealt primarily with the sociological aspects of Ibn Khalduns historical theory, and the same interest predominates in all but one of the three or four articles published since 1917. Of the latest studies it may be said that, though still giving prominence to the social aspect, they cover as a whole a rather wider ground. Dr. Gaston Bouthoul, indeed, limits himself in his title 4 to Ibn Khaldun's “Social Philosophy,” but the contents of his essay overleap these bounds, especially the first thirty pages, devoted to a very suggestive analysis of the personality and intellectual outlook of the historian. Professor Schmidt's tractate 5 is in the nature of a survey of the field; he assembles and examines the views of earlier writers on different aspects of Ibn Khaldun's work, but does not put forward any synthesis of his own. Lastly, the two recent German works of Drs. Kamil Ayad 6 and Erwin Rosenthal 7 mark a return towards the more strictly historical thought of the Muqaddirna, and the latter in particular is the first monograph to be devoted exclusively to Ibn Khaldun's political theory. 8 The two books differ considerably in plan. Dr. Ayad, after a long and philosophical introduction on the general trends of Islamic cultural and intellectual development, displays a remarkable critical faculty and acuteness of observation in the analysis of Ibn Khaldun's historical method, and concludes by examining in outline his social theory. Dr. Rosenthal on the other hand prefers to let Ibn Khaldun explain himself, and describes his own work as “a modest attempt to present the historian with the material from which to construct a picture of Ibn Khaldun's view of the state, by means of as accurate a translation as possible of the most important passages in his Muqaddima in which he analyses the theory of the state, together with an historical interpretation limited strictly to the text.” 9
