Old Islamic History

 Islamic History

It's all fine and natural for ancient

 empires to rise and fall, but it's no fair when it happens to me.   And, as it turns out, even the people who came before us Big Fancy Moderns realized how drearily   unpleasant it is to be suffocated by the Sands of Time. Although earlier Historians had astutely   caught on to the idea that knowing what happened before you might come in handy in a pinch,   it wasn't until the 14th century that a scholar from North Africa would figure out some of the   actual mechanisms behind Why History Can Be So Thoroughly Miserable To Live Through. This,   if I may be so bold, was quite a big deal. So, far from being Just Another Historian,   Ibn Khaldun was the first true Historiographer, whose writings and insights reshaped the Study   Of History us by giving us the tools to better understand how the past unfolded, why, and what   that might mean for the rest of us. So, to see how Ibn Khaldun took the study of Narratives   and transformed it into a study of Systems, Let's do some Historiography. ... What? That's   the correct word in this case! History is just the narratives, he was doing the bigger thing!   I know it doesn't roll off the tongue very well, I don't care, I'm being accurate!To understand   the life and work of Ibn Khaldun, we need to zoom out and see what was up in the wider Muslim world.   The multicentury Golden Age of Islam that started in the mid 700s with the Abbassid Caliphate had   come to a sudden and startling end with the arrival of the Mongols and the utter flattening   of Baghdad in 1258. What had once been the world's greatest venue for scholars, philosophers,   physicians, astronomers, mathematicians, poets, musicians, architects, theologians and a whole   lot of other smart people was no longer the most glorious city in the medieval world and a shining   beacon of Muslim culture, but rather a burnt husk of a city left as a warning to anybody who would   stand up to the Mongols. Yikes. Aside from the unsolicited absorption of Persia and Mesopotamia,   Islamic states in the west also had a rough go in the 1200s, as the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia   were pushing against the remaining cities in Al-Andalus, taking Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in   1248. This of course isn't to say that everything was a broken mess, as, for instance, the Egyptian   Mamluk Sultanate was still enjoying high culture, stability, and great prosperity. But the picture   I'm trying to paint here is that the Muslim world, which had long been the domain of large,   expanding states, now in the 12 and 1300s was home to very much smaller and more fragile states.And   this was the world that our main man Ibn Khaldun found himself in. His family traced its ancestry   back to ancient Yemen at the time of Muhammad, but followed the expansion outwards and lived in   Al-Andalus throughout the Golden Age — which, let me tell you, when you roll the dice on Places To   Live In History, Medieval Muslim Spain is tough to beat, I recognize that's my personal opinion,   but ooh man they had it going good over there. But, as we just saw, Castile kept on coming,   so after Seville changed hands in 1248, the family hopped over to North Africa to settle in Tunis,   where Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332. If we're being thorough, his full name was actually this, but   that's a lot, so he did as many do and simplified to his family name Khaldun, with Ibn being a   standard Arabic patronymic for "Son of". SO, Ibn Khaldun had the fortune to be raised in Tunis,   which at the time was one of Post-Golden-Age Africa's big centers of scholarship, thanks in   part to its community of expats from Al-Andalus. However, he had the misfortune grow up during the   Black Death, which claimed his parents as well as all of his teachers in the late 1340s.But Ibn   Khaldun wouldn't let a little plague get in the way of things, because in addition to being smart,   he was also relentlessly ambitious, so he traveled to Fes in Morocco to get a job in   the civil service of the Marinid dynasty. The work was good but a little on the unstable side,   as North African politics were shifty and fragile, with conflict arising between states as well as   within them. As we'll see shortly, Ibn Khaldun had a nasty habit of ending up on the wrong side   of political intrigue, sometimes as a result of a scheme he himself had instigated. So throughout   his career working as an administrator, diplomat, governor, tax collector, or whatever else,   he'd eventually end up on the bad side of someone powerful, and then forced out of politics, exiled,   or just thrown in jail, only to be released when Ibn Khaldun's antagonist of the week was   inevitably ousted as well. Whatever the case, Ibn Khaldun had a hard time holding down a job in any   one place for too long, so his career took him all over North Africa and even briefly to Al-Andalus.   During his career he spent a significant amount of time with the nomadic Bedouin people of the Sahara   and became quite fond of them. But while playing politics was all fun and games until he got thrown   in jail again, Ibn Khaldun really wanted to write a history of North Africa, and it's a little hard   to do that when you're looking over your shoulder every 15 seconds to see who's scheming to take   you down. He decided to get away from the racket and distraction of the big cities, take it easy,   unplug, and find a quiet place to write his book. So he went into the desert!You know, I joke, but   I actually think he was onto something here. In the small Bedouin town of Qalat Ibn Salama on the   far side of the Atlas Mountains, Ibn Khaldun spent a few years writing his History. And although he   was lacking slightly in the documentation one would typically consult for writing a universal   history of the world, he was able to hammer out the intro. Lucky for all of us, it is one damn   fine introduction. Because, just by itself, Al Muqaddimah is one of the most innovative   historical works ever written. Clocking in at a brisk several hundred pages, the Muqaddimah   sets the stage for its accompanying history by exploring the nature of society and the mechanisms   that govern how history unfolds. To that end, the Muqaddimah's 6 main chapters dig into sociology,   politics, urban life, economics, and philosophy. This was all necessary groundwork for a Universal   History, as compared to the more straightforward and pin-pointed narrative histories we've seen up   until this point. He wasn't just explaining what happened in any one corner of the map,   or even why some particular thing happened, but why things happen in general. This allowed Ibn   Khaldun to look much more broadly at processes like how the environment of agriculture influences   the economy of an urban state which in turn can determine their political prospects.Not content   to simply explain How The World Works, Ibn Khaldun also took aim at his colleagues in the field,   whom he thought were all far too lazy in their treatment of sources. He called out historical   partisanship, overconfidence in sources without actually questioning whether theyÕre believable   or not, failures to understand authorial intent, and simplistic views of cause-and-effect. Now,   versions of those arguments had been made before, with even Herodotus and Thucydides weighing in on   how History should be conducted, but no one had gone so far as to distill Human Society   into a science to aid in Historical analysis. Whaddya doing writing about the rise and fall of   empires if you canÕt even figure out how economics affected the Roman political system, ya goof!   In practice, one of Ibn Khaldun's key insights was Asabiyya, an Arabic term that roughly translates   to social cohesion. The idea behind it is that "teamwork makes the dream work", especially when   the "Dream" in question is an Imperial Dynasty. According to Ibn Khaldun, nobody had stronger   Asabiyya than the Bedouin nomads, because there's no way you're surviving in an inhospitable desert   climate without some serious group solidarity.

And he cited this off-the-charts Asabiyya as the main   reason Bedouin tribes were often so successful in going out and conquering cities and states in the   sedentary world. But while a cooperative spirit is the foundation of all success,   its unraveling was the ultimate source of failure, as Ibn Khaldun explains how a settled nomad group   would slowly begin to prioritize comfortable living over good teamwork and, essentially,   become weak. As generations passed, kings got up in swankier palaces and stopped paying attention   to the needs their people, so the state became fragile, making easy prey for another group with   stronger Asabiyya to come in and knock them over. This Generational model traces a rather clean arc:   where a group first creates a dynasty, then the next generation builds it up and takes it to its   peak, the third gets content to coast and let the state decline, and the last is powerless   to stop it from shattering at the slightest inconvenience, whereupon a new group starts   the cycle over. That's the way History goes: Build, Peak, Decline, Fall; Build, Peak, Decline,   Fall, on and on, into eternity. This applies most overtly to the politics of North Africa, where   nomadic people are always at the periphery of the sedentary world, but that general model does   a scarily good job of describing the course of most of the rest of History. In some situations, a   state might be lucky enough to swap in "Fall" with "Reform" and buy themselves one more go-around,   but not everyone can be the Byzantine Empire. Of course, in the centuries since Ibn Khaldun,   historians have massively expanded on this model, developing full theories of economics, politics,   culture, and technology to answer the questions of Why History Does The Thing — But early versions of   those fields-of-study do also contribute to Ibn Khaldun's analysis; So let's not mis-characterize   the Muqaddimah as just chalking up historical successes and failures to the direct and exclusive   function of Magic Teamwork Juice, because we have to appreciate Ibn Khaldun's novelty of thought   and sheer genius to have basically slam-dunked Historiography right out the gate. Overall, he   viewed history as cyclical, operating in seasons of bloom and decay. While at first it seems like   he doesn't allow for meaningful progress, he did distinctly account for turning points that had   rippling effects throughout history. In his case, the Mongols and the black death were two massive   (though distinctly related) shocks that fundamentally transformed the landscape   of history. For Ibn Khaldun, the inevitable rise and fall of states was perhaps more a seasonal   happening than a strictly cyclical one.So, after completing the most transformational   work of historiography this side of Thucydides, yeah I said it, Ibn Khaldun returned to Tunis   to work on the actual history book that had the honor of accompanying the Muqaddimah. Four years   later when the work was all done, he had slipped back into his old habit of making enemies, so,   in the interest of bouncing right the hell out of there as politely as possible, he requested to go   on pilgrimage to Mecca, and then spent the rest of his life as a judge, scholar, and teacher in   the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate — He might have gone back to his old political shenanigans,   but he retired after the tragic death of his wife and children in an accident off the coast   of Alexandria. Although Ibn Khaldun went on record as saying Egypt was the pinnacle of Islam's power   and generally a sweet place to be, even it was not fully spared the wrecking ball of fate, as   the turn of the century brought the self-declared Genghis Khan 2.0 AKA Tamerlane AKA Timur the Lame   AKA Timur the Jerk AKA Bad News. He had rolled up to the city of Damascus threatening to trample   the place like it was 1258, so Ibn Khaldun got dispatched to negotiate, and spent nearly two   months in Timur's camp. The two of them got on well, at least, as well as you can with the guy   who's about to burn your city, as recounted extensively in Ibn Khaldun's autobiography   (which, I should say, is why we're lucky enough to actually know anything about the man.).   And although Ibn Khaldun could hardly convince Tamerlane to just pack up and leave, he was at   least able to secure himself safe passage home to Egypt to live out the rest of his days in peace.   And that's the surprisingly turbulent life of Ibn Khaldun. In perhaps one of History's   clearest cases of Lived-Experience informing someone's Written-Work, the Muqaddimah shows   a deep understanding of society's fragilities and its constant capacity for renewal, while   deliberately opening the door for later scholars to expand on his system. So what if the Islamic   Golden Age ended over a century ago, catch our boy over here writing the most subject-defining   work since the classical period! If our modern practice of History has any scientific merits,   we should give the credit where it's due. Thank you for watching! I'd like to thank our   friend and fellow YouTube educator Al Muqaddimah (yes, same name as the book) for helping with my   script as well as the visual inspiration for this episode's maps. If you're interested in learning   more about the long and varied history of Islam, it's definitely worth your time to check out his   channel. As for this video here, it was also nice to relive the fun of when I had read part of the   Muqaddimah for a college social science course. And, as Ibn Khaldun shows us, all things must   eventually come to an end, so it's fitting that this video will wrap my 2020. I'm really looking   forward to making some great videos for you all in the coming year, so I'll see you then.