Ibn Khaldūn: Political Thought

Gabriel Martinez-Gros is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Paris Nanterre. In 1999 he founded and co-directed the Institute for Islam and Islamic Societies Studies (in French, IISMM), the main Department of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes dedicated to Islamic Studies. He has published twelve books, four of them inspired by Ibn Khaldûn's thought. His most recent publication is La traîne des empires (2022). Anna Bailey Galietti is a translator and scholar of Arabic literature. Her previous translations of French academic writing on topics related to the Near East include Antoine Borrut's Between Memory and Power: The Syrian Space under the Late Umayyads and Early Abbasids.

General Introduction: Ibn Khaldūn: A Theory for Our Time?; Part I. On History: 1. History is a branch of philosophy; 2. Errors to which historians are prone; Part II. On Combat Solidarities: 3. Man is a social animal; 4. Bedouins are naturally courageous, much more so than sedentary peoples; 5. On combat solidarities, and the conditions in which their strength declines; 6. Bedouin nations are more skilled at conquest than other nations; 7. As long as combat solidarities exist among members of the same nation, the monarchy will remain in that nation's control, even if power changes hands between its various branches; 8. When the Arabs take control of cultivated territories, they quickly bring about their ruin; Part III. On The State: 9. States and universal dynasties are built by tribes and combat solidarities; 10. A religious cause endows a nascent dynasty with force in addition to the combat solidarities derived from the number of its supporters; 11. Every dynasty controls a finite number of domains and territories, which cannot be exceeded; 12. It is natural for the sovereign to isolate himself in his glory, seeking peace and comfort; 13. The leader of the dynasty puts his clients and those whom he has reared before his kin and his own combat solidarities; 14. The caliphate; the kingdom of the Jews; and the pope and the emperor in Christendom; 15. On war; 16. On taxation; 17. The dissolution of a dynasty; 18. A nascent dynasty cannot overthrow the sitting dynasty in a single blow; victory must come in time; Part IV. Cities: 19. States precede cities and capitals; the latter cannot exist without the prior existence of the state; 20. On the construction and organization of cities; 21. The superiority of urban centres and cities, the prosperity of their inhabitants, and the amount of spending in their markets are based on the size of their populations; 22. On prices in cities; 23. Sedentary civilization is the highest and final degree of any civilization; for this reason, it is destined to decay and disintegrate; 24. On military and civil functions, and their respective roles in the rise and fall of capital cities; Part V. Earning a Living; 25. On the true meaning of 'subsistence' and 'profit'; commentary on these two terms; profit as the value of human labour; 26. Happiness and profit generally go to those who are skilled at flattery and know when to bend the knee; 27. Crafts and professions cannot fully flourish if sedentary civilization and population growth are not flourishing as well; Part VI. Sciences: 28. Sciences are concentrated in centres of high population density, where sedentary civilization is firmly entrenched; 29. The categories of the intellectual sciences; 30. The burden of the sciences in Islam fell primarily upon the shoulder of the Persians; 31. Learning a language is like mastering any other craft; Part VII Texts from Ibn Khaldūn's Universal History; 32. On the origins of the Hilālī invasions; 33. Succession in Tlemcen: the assassination of the sultan Abū Ḥammū and the accession of his son, Abū Tāshfīn (1318); 34. The history of the kingdom of Granada (1238–1492); 35. A short history of Islam.