Theorizing from Within: Ibn Khaldun and His Political Culture
version of them, we may be able to understand that a different kind of social science sensibility is consistent with Arab/Islamic thought than we had imagined and that it is, therefore, all the more unfair, as some commentators have maintained, to assert that Arab culture lacks a view of social forces that are not implicit in religious doctrine. In sum, if we simply measure Ibn Khaldun and other thinkers who partake of his cultural traditions against theorists from the West, we will miss the enormous vitality of their distinctive contributions to social thought. Indeed, reading between the lines of Ibn Khaldun-for his culture, his type of theorizing, his view of humanity--can enrich our view of history and of the social ideas of our Arab contemporaries as well as remind us that we do neither scholarship nor cross-cultural understanding a favor if we simply merge all of culture and history into a common theme. The tendency, particularly prevalent among Americans, to presume that all cultures are basically the same should have been brought up sharp by current events: Globalism has by no means eliminated the local, indeed it may have exacerbated it. Between making everyone like "us" and making any one culture better than another there lies, however, the wiser and truer proposition, nowhere more cogently expressed than in the Prophetic Tradition that says "there is no distinction except as to knowledge," and in that common Arab saying, "a difference is not a distinction." It would be unfortunate to lose Ibn Khaldun's appreciation of the distinctive nature of each society in an attempt to render him the grandfather of a very Western-style grand theory of history and society. References Hourani, Albert. 1991. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Irwin, Robert. 1997. "Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun." Middle Eastern Studies 33 (July):461-79. Khaldun, Ibn. 1987. An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332-1406). Princeton, PA: The Darwin Press. Lacoste, Yves. 1984. Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World. London, UK: Verso. Mahdi, Muhsin. 1957. Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History: A Study in the Foundation of the Science of Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. . 1968. "Ibn Khaldun." Pp. 53-57 in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by D. L. Sills. New York: The Macmillan Company and The Free Press. Rosen, Lawrence. 2002. The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rosenthal, Franz. 1987. "Ibn Khaldun." Pp. 565-67 in The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by M. Eliade. New York: The Macmillan Company. Toynbee, Arnold J. 1948. A Study of History, Vol. III. New York: Oxford University Press. Contemporary Sociology 34, 6 This content downloaded on Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:25:06 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions