Abd-ar-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami of Tunis . . . an Arabic Genius who achieved in a single “acquiescence” of less than four years’ length, out of a fifty-four years’ span of adult working life, a life-work in the shape of a piece of literature which can bear comparison with the work of Thucydides or the work of a Machiavelli for both breadth and profundity of vision as well as for sheer intellectual power . . . in the Prolegomena (Muqaddamat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place. (Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (1955) Vol. III, 321–2.)
1. Introduction
This study attempts to shed light on one of the central ideas in the early years of international law: intercultural origins.Footnote 1 The aim is to explore the precursory role of Ibn Khaldun's (1332–1406) thinking on the interdependence and continuing interaction of legal, economic, sociological, and political imperatives of civilization discourse.Footnote 2
Ibn Khaldun was one of the most influential Muslim legal, economic, and political theorists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote 3 He wrote two important works, the Muqaddimah, as a Prolegomenon to his Kitab al-Ibar,Footnote 4 and the History of the Berbers.Footnote 5 The Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) is a significant reference work for legal, economic, historical, and sociological research, focusing on the histories of North Africa and Spain. These histories gave the writer the opportunity to illustrate his theory of cultural fluctuations, which led peoples living a sedentary life to a nomadic life, and vice versa. This theory of fluctuations (or cycles) focuses on political-economic movements. In fact, he made a great contribution to the progress of western thought with his theory of history as a logical progression of events, which follow each other in understandable ways.Footnote 6
The dawn of the twenty-first century has seen a revival of the discourse of civilization among critical legal scholars. These authors have reconstructed a historical process of ‘rise, fall, and rise’ of the ‘standard of civilization’, connecting its revival with the current existence of a (neo-)colonial paradigm in international law in an era of globalization and global governance.Footnote 7 Most of them consider that the various actors in the international community are using international law to impose a (neo-)liberal, globalized civilization on the world.Footnote 8 The writers in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) have found a continuity linking the doctrines deployed to legitimate Western colonialism and the (neo-)colonial concepts developed after the Second World War.Footnote 9
Globalization has revealed the shortcomings of states when confronting new political dynamics and global economics.Footnote 10 When attempting to explain the phenomenon of globalization, international lawyers trawl through history in an effort to find answers to present-day problems.Footnote 11 The core elements of both political and economic activity (such as money, taxation, and supply and demand, among others) are legal institutions. The history of political and economic life is, therefore, also a history of institutions and laws;Footnote 12 the law creates the actors, places them in structures and helps set the terms for their interaction. In this framework, the revival of Ibn Khaldun's economic, political, and legal thinking could contribute to an understanding of the intercultural origins of international law.Footnote 13 At the same time, this thinking embedded the central (Western) and peripheral (non-Western) patterns of dynamic inequality in global political and economic society.
Medieval international law is considered to be of increasing intellectual relevance for issues such as global law,Footnote 14 legal pluralismFootnote 15, and multilevel governance.Footnote 16 The rise of non-state actors, particularly corporations, and the role of non-state law (informal law) in the system of global governance has fostered a medieval revival in international law.Footnote 17 In an attempt to explain this situation, authors such as H. Bull have found similarities between global society today and the feudal community of the Middle Ages.Footnote 18 Other authors such as J. Friedrichs have considered the fate of globalization using the discourse of the (neo-)medieval renaissance to explain the model of the (neo-)liberal global economy supported by international organizations and institutions dominated by western powers and private global interests.Footnote 19
In addition, the interest in medieval international law has been influenced by post-colonial scholarship in international law.Footnote 20 Legal scholars have returned to the work of the classical Spanish writers of the School of Salamanca,Footnote 21 addressing the colonial origins of international lawFootnote 22 and making analogies with the political organization of the Middle Ages.Footnote 23
The aim of this study is to explore the medieval Islamic origin of a political, economic, and legal language linked to the ‘standard of civilization’ through a historiographical study of the work of Ibn Khaldun.Footnote 24 The relations between Islam and Christianity were strong in his day, especially in the field of commerce, trade, and diplomacy.Footnote 25 At that time, the law of ‘intercultural’ peoples emergedFootnote 26 and frequent contact gave rise to reciprocal influences between the two worlds, and not only in the area of the law.Footnote 27 This study is undoubtedly a formidable undertaking, not without its risks, for a sensitive internationalist interested in the legal, political, cultural, and economic concept of the state, as well as in the origins and critique of international law and its history.Footnote 28
It is not the aim of this article to undertake an exhaustive analysis of the work of Ibn Khaldun, nor of the Islamic legal system, nor of international law in the Late Middle Ages, which lie beyond the scope of this study. The intention is to show how the legal, political, historical, sociological, and economic narrative of Ibn Khaldun influenced the conjunction of elements that were essential to the civilizing language promoted by European and American liberals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 29
My argument is organized into three parts. The first part examines Ibn Khaldun's life as a way of understanding his thinking on the rise and fall of civilization. Although Ibn Khaldun's legacy has remained obscure to many students of international law, he is a critical protagonist in the universal expansion of international law as part of the progress of the ‘standard of civilization’.Footnote 30
The second part explores the influence of Ibn Khaldun's work on the discourse surrounding the ‘standard of civilization’, by reintroducing the interpretation of Rafael Altamira (1866–1951).Footnote 31 The significance of the tripartite classification of J. Lorimer (civilized, barbaric, and savage) was shaped under the influence of the positivization of the doctrine of the ‘standard of civilization’ during the era of imperialism and liberalism. This rise was related to a law designed to meet both the needs of industrial and capitalist pioneering investors, and the needs of absolute sovereignty in European legal expansion. This rise of the ‘standard of civilization’ coincided with a positivist stage crushing rationalist natural law in the nineteenth century and the parallel decline of the influence of international law on the relationship between Christianity and natural law.
The third section starts with the contribution of Ibn Khaldun to the study of economic science and its reception into civilizing language according to the approach of Joseph Spengler (1902–1991).Footnote 32 Ibn Khaldun's theory has the empirical and theoretical power to not only explain the consequences of government policies on production and trade, investment, and specialization, but to also predict the survival of civilization. In this section we examine several Islamic economic institutions and their influence on the state and concept of international law.Footnote 33
The study ends with reflections on the precursory role of this Islamic thinker in interdependence and the continuing interaction of economic, sociological, and political imperatives in the rise and fall of civilizations.
2. Universal theorist in medieval Islam
Ibn Khaldun was born on 27 May 1332 in the city of Tunis. His family, originally Yemenite Arabs, had fled there a few years previously from Seville to escape the Christian Reconquest of Spain, but soon gained power and prominence within the Hasfid government. He was well educated in the educational fundamentals of the Quran, Arabic poetry, Muslim law, and Aristotelian philosophy and physics.Footnote 34
Political instability and a constantly shifting balance of power had a great effect on Ibn Khaldun's legal thinking about the discourse of civilizations.Footnote 35 After three years in Fez, he experienced the first of many stretches of imprisonment. He remained incarcerated for more than a year and a half until the reigning Sultan died and his heir had many political prisoners released. However, the Hafsids were again becoming powerful in the region and remembered the desertion of the young Ibn Khaldun. In order to escape the situation, he moved to Granada (the last Muslim Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula).Footnote 36
In 1362, Ibn Khaldun headed a delegation to draw up a peace treaty between the Sultan of Granada and the Christian Kingdom of Castile (ruled by King Pedro I ‘the Cruel’).Footnote 37 The two parties met in Seville and Ibn Khaldun was given a personal tour of the city by King Pedro.Footnote 38 During that time, King Pedro offered Ibn Khaldun a secret deal: if he would betray Granada he would be rewarded with the return of his family's ancestral land in Seville and a place in the Castilian government. He refused and called off the treaty negotiations immediately.Footnote 39
Ibn Khaldun continued at this fast pace throughout his life, switching governments several more times. He was briefly Grand Vizier for the Hafsid-related Emir of Bougie; fled into the desert for a year; built an army of desert Arabs; and took a position under the Sultan of Tlemcen. Later, he revisited the prisons of Fez when its Sultanate conquered Tlemcen in 1372.Footnote 40 Afterwards, he was forced into service as a military leader fighting for Fez, fled back to the Iberian Peninsula, and was forced to return to protect his family. In the end, he fled back into the desert where he experienced the first peaceful period of his life during his seven years under the protection of the desert tribe of Awlad ‘Arif.Footnote 41
Ibn Khaldun lived in various countries in North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt) and in the South of the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus, in the cities of Cordoba and Seville) during the turbulent final years of the Almohads. His book Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) was written far from Al-Andalus, in time and space, but the author had surely never forgotten the sights, smells, and flavours of Seville at the time of King Pedro I.Footnote 42
He himself considered his theory of history to be so significant that he devoted most of the Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) to explaining the details regarding the rise and fall of civilizations, stating several times that he had created an entirely new field of study.Footnote 43 By changing history from the telling of stories to an observable science that could explain and perhaps even predict human behaviour, he claimed to have changed the understanding of human behaviour entirely.Footnote 44 Although many of his basic explanations are today discarded, the idea that such explanations could exist has led modern thinkers to claim Ibn Khaldun as a precursor in the philosophy of history, historiography, anthropology, economics, and sociology.
Ibn Khaldun's core idea in the Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) was that the purpose of civilization is to bring people together in increasingly large groups so that they can achieve what they cannot individually, and provide for their common defence. The purpose of dynasties (civilizations or states) could be seen as a way to keep a densely-packed society together despite its inherent tendency to fall apart.Footnote 45 The responsibility of a good leader is to keep society stable, and the measure of his greatness is the degree to which he succeeds. However, he also recognized that people as a general rule are selfish, violent, and cruel, and that bringing them together in cities exacerbates these tendencies.
The instrument which kept some societies together while others fell apart was something called ’asabiyah.Footnote 46 This is an Arabic word which can mean ‘solidarity’ or ‘group consciousness’ but is usually translated as ‘group feeling’.Footnote 47 At the most basic level, ’asabiyah is something that a person feels for his family. In this respect, it might also be translated as ‘brotherhood’ or ‘society of men’. When a ruler is successful, he manages to spread the ’asabiyah to all members of society, so that they all think of one another as they would think of their own brothers. Due to the limited scope of his study, and to Ibn Khaldun's inability as a medieval Muslim to think of religion in a functionalist way, he never mentioned the role that religion can serve in promoting ’asabiyah.Footnote 48
Ibn Khaldun stated that, given the natural progress of things, a dawlah (civilization or state) would fall apart in four generations. This is based on his observation that, while the concentration of people enables the necessary specialization to support a full-time government and army (and religious hierarchy, although he appears to have omitted that part), it also introduces luxuries into people's lives, which eventually corrupt them with selfishness and damage the ’asabiyah.Footnote 49 A particularly strong ruler can delay the collapse but, in Ibn Khaldun's theory, events are inherently cyclical and each dawlah contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.Footnote 50
In Ibn Khaldun's view, history is a continuous cycle of growth and decline, without evolution or progress, except for the progression from a primitive to a civilized society.
3. Socio-historical thought in medieval Islam
The return to the language and ‘standard of civilization’ has been identified by its critics with the existence today of a (neo-)colonial current in international law built on the pillars of democracy – the rule of law and human rights. These components were not part of the ‘standard of civilization’ of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At that time, neither international law nor the ‘civilized’ states (the Western states) imposed conditions on ‘non-civilized’ states (the non-Western states) to adopt specific forms of government. Nor did they oblige these states on the ‘periphery’ to treat their citizens in the same manner in which the Western powers wished their own citizens to be treated.Footnote 51
The doctrine of the ‘standard of civilization’ took shape during the era of imperialism in the late nineteenth century. It was related to both the economic interests of capitalism,Footnote 52 and the needs of an absolute sovereignty in European Law.Footnote 53 The rise of the ‘standard of civilization’ coincided with the rise of positivism and the decline of the concept of natural law in the nineteenth century, together with the erosion of the relationship between Christianity and natural law. It represented an instrument of Christian universality as a justification for the expansion of international law in its so-called ‘civilizing mission’ as opposed to other cultures and religions; the secularizing process had already begun in order to justify the equality of sovereign rights among European peoples in a Christiana res publica. Footnote 54 Interestingly, the sovereign equality invoked in the ‘standard of civilization’ was denied to certain non-Western peoples in the last third of the nineteenth century.Footnote 55
The ‘standard of civilization’ (including both an internal and an external dimension) constituted the transposing of the characteristics of Western states to their relations with non-Western states as a criterion for the latter to enjoy the rights associated with full sovereignty. From an internal angle, the greater or lesser adaptation of the ‘standard of civilization’ depended on the extent to which the ‘other’ state adopted European-style political institutions aimed at the protection of the lives and properties of Westerners. Externally, the application of the ‘standard of civilization’ was related to the degree of respect for the rules of Western international law and ‘civilized’ behaviour at an international level.Footnote 56
In the nineteenth century, the effective application of the ‘standard of civilization’ was adapted to the various forms of colonization used in different places and at different times. In some cases, the ‘standard of civilization’ was used to justify assimilation after conquest or the cession of territories and the establishment of certain legal systems by the mother country of those territories (which then became part of the colonial system). In other cases, the ‘standard of civilization’ was hidden beneath the fiction of sovereignty, dependent upon the consent of those territories that retained sovereignty over internal affairs, while the mother country managed its international relations.
The use of the term ‘civilization’ began to spread in Europe during the French Revolution to express the idea of progress and the perfection of human beings as a universal concept that could be achieved through law and institutions. Attaining civilization was to be a collective achievement of mankind. However, the implication was that the epitome of unity and perfection was to be found in European civilization. Therefore, its opposite, barbarism, was to be found outside Europe. Europeans considered that Europe had managed to achieve civilization and that it should be spread to the rest of the world.Footnote 57 Nevertheless, how was this discourse on civilization formulated in the nineteenth century? Is it possible to find Muslim roots? Could Ibn Khaldun be considered as a precursor of such thinking?
Ibn Khaldun's work became known in Spain due to the pioneering work of Julián Ribera Tarragó (1858–1934), particularly in his address published as La enseñanza entre los musulmanes españoles (1893).Footnote 58 Ribera was a Spanish philologist and Arabist interested in the richness of Arabic civilization and the close influences between Arab and Christian vocabularies. In fact, it was he who discovered the ‘Mozarabic’ dialect.Footnote 59
However, it was Rafael Altamira who provided a more detailed and in-depth analysis in his Notas sobre la doctrina de Abenjaldun,Footnote 60 about the dissemination, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, of ‘extracts, chapters and translations of fragments of the Prolegomenos of Abenjaldún . . . which turned out to be a monument of outstanding interest in medieval historiography’.Footnote 61 The complete translation by William MacGuckinn, Baron de Slane,Footnote 62 ‘enabled all orientalists to read that first part of the Universal History by Abenjaldun’.Footnote 63
We can see how the work of Ibn Khaldun influenced the ideas of Altamira and other contemporary authors such as José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), one of Spain's foremost philosophers of the twentieth century. Ortega reflected on how to include Spain among European democracies. To this end, he used the origins of Spanish ‘civilization’ as the basis for his discourse on Spain's role in Europe.Footnote 64
Ibn Khaldun divided his study of history into an external and an internal aim. The external aim ‘served to relate events that marked the course of the centuries and dynasties – civilizations or states – and that have been witnesses of past generations’. The internal aim was the ‘examination and checking of the facts, the investigation of the causes and a profound knowledge of the manner in which events took place and their origins’.Footnote 65
The fundamentals of history for Ibn Khaldun, to allow the prediction of ‘future events’ as Altamira observed, lie in historical causality and not in metaphysics. The general notions of history comprise the various characteristics of civilization; sovereignty; the means of creating wealth; the sciences; and the arts. More specifically, there are six attributes of man that are fundamental for history: the arts and sciences; government; work and industry; sociability; the nomadic social state; and the sedentary social state. Two other conditioning factors need to be added: race, and the physical environment. All knowledge linked to these ‘attributes’ represents a contribution to history. It was Ibn Khaldun himself who established the distinction between the material history of the Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History), and historical history.Footnote 66
Ibn Khaldun established an almost impassable divide between the Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) and history. In this regard, he wrote:
the true aim of history is to make us understand the social state of mankind, in other words civilization, and to teach us the phenomena that accompany it, for instance, the life of savagery, the duplication of customs, the spirit of the family and the tribe, the different ways in which groups of people achieve superiority over others and the resulting birth of empires and dynasties, the distinction of ranks, the occupations to which people dedicate their work, efforts and professions by which they make a living, the sciences, the arts, in fact all the changes that things by their nature can produce in the character of a society.Footnote 67
It may be inferred from this comment that there remains some doubt or concern that, on occasion, the Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) fulfils the criteria of political history. However, such a suspicion does not seem to be shared by other authors. Among others, Louis Baeck published his essay La pensée économique de l’Islam classique (1990),Footnote 68 and despite his brief references to the work of Ibn Khaldun, he said that:
the political, social and economic sciences find one of their pioneers in the analysis of the mechanisms of the creation and dissolution of societies. From the methodological point of view, Ibn Khaldun introduces the realism (positivism) of the social sciences into the tradition of normative thought . . . He can be considered as a forefather of the social sciences.Footnote 69
Altamira's reproach to Ibn Khaldun for the absence, in his work, of any moral concern in history in relation to the personal condition of the historian, to his impartiality, and to the benefit of always telling the truth about events or concealing it, is much more relevant.Footnote 70
Another of Altamira's critiques refers to the conception of Kulturgeschichte, which can be construed from the Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History). In his analysis, the idea of impersonal social movements following a course that determines the future of empires and dynasties (civilizations or states) is at odds with his claim about the need for a man, whether a politician or a prophet, to plan for change, thus reaffirming transcendence – ’asabiyah.Footnote 71 Such contradictions occur in any study of the scientific products of the environment, even in more recent times. In this regard, Altamira explains that:
the general conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that, while apparently making significant progress – at least theoretically – in Muslim historiography, and while pioneering many modern ideas, Abenjaldún is very far – as can only be expected – from satisfying the current exigencies of historical doctrine, and we should therefore be careful not to exaggerate the scope of his initiatives. The opposite would have been very strange given the conditions or laws to which the development of the human spirit is subject. It is more than sufficient that in the 14th century, a time when European historiography was so lacking and so far from the conceptions of character explained and defended by Abenjaldún, that a book such as the Prolegomenos should have been written, which establishes or implies almost all the problems, understood in the broadest sense, that later became the principal concerns of modern historians.Footnote 72
Ultimately, Ibn Khaldun's work inspired Altamira's ideas on the history of civilizations, in particular the Spanish civilization (state and nation). Altamira tried to link the existence of a vital living reality subject to the law, whose archetypal form was the nation. Of course, this idea of historical ‘organicism’ entrenched in the nation is passé today. Nowadays, we see social reality as a constant flux of tensions between different social spheres of action without a general logic that could regulate these conflicts.
4. Economic thought in medieval Islam
Ibn Khaldun's thinking has been invoked by governments to justify (neo-)liberal economic policy, particularly fiscal policy based on the ‘supply-side economics’.Footnote 73 These public uses of Ibn Khaldun's ideas place him as the source of (neo-)liberal discourse denounced by TWAIL writers, among others. (Neo-)liberal economists advocate liberalization and/or deregulation of trade and investment to encourage economic growth. They also consider it necessary to remove positive rules and restrictions as far as possible. Defending this kind of economy conceals an unequal and discriminatory system that leads us to have some control over the resources, investments, or trade of the ‘other’.Footnote 74 Why has the ‘standard of civilization’ played, and why does it continue to play, a prominent role in international economic law? Which are the economic institutions of Ibn Khaldun embedded in the ‘standard of civilization’?
Economic scholars argued that Ibn Khaldun's thinking was the link between ideas of the economy and economic science.Footnote 75 To some extent, the American economist Joseph Spengler, in his essay Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun (1963), considered that the alternative of economic science in the scientific world was attributed to Ibn Khaldun.Footnote 76 For this author, the significance of Ibn Khaldun's work lies in the fact that he understood the forces that governed the rise and fall of dynasties (civilizations or states) by analysing the consequences of the economic activity, their acquisition, and their correlation with the level of ‘civilization’ or culture.Footnote 77
The extent of economic knowledge in Islam owed more to an interest in issues relating to taxation than to contact with philosophical and scientific thinkers, especially Plato and the Neoplatonists, much read by erudite Arabs.Footnote 78 Erwin J. Rosenthal, in his book Political Thought in Medieval Islam (1958),Footnote 79 revived the influence of the Greeks on Muslim thought, showing that the wisdom derived from classical philosophy was due to the need to confirm the natural theology of Islam centred on the Quran and the prophetic tradition.Footnote 80
The idea of evolution was far from the core of Quranic tradition, which was immutable in terms of commerce and extracanonical administrative law. For the majority of Muslim writers, the ‘economy’ was classified as a practical science, together with politics and ethics. Economic issues, such as usury, were resolved by direct recourse to the Quran and the Sunna. The works of legal historians did not contribute to the development of economic analysis because history was not considered a science, among other reasons.Footnote 81
Ibn Khaldun did not specifically identify either economics or politics as sciences. His firm conviction lay in the creation of a new science of ‘civilization’ or culture. This attached little importance to the improvement of the human condition that could be expected from scientific progress. Ibn Khaldun believed that ‘civilization’ tended to fluctuate and that the state of science fluctuated with it, from the low level of nomadic peoples to the highest level of the civilized centres of the Muslim world. His main concern focused on an explanation of ‘social organization and civilization’.Footnote 82
The Muqaddimah (Prolegomena to History) is a model of historical and sociological research. It selects the histories of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula as ‘fields’ of observation. In these stories, the protagonist is presented with the opportunity to observe the cultural fluctuations that lead sedentary population to nomadic life, and vice versa. According to the outline of this theory: a new dynasty (civilization or state) comes to power, gains strength, and dominates an area where urban civilization can flourish; as a result, the professions increase in number and the division of labour multiplies; this gives rise to an expanding market (with a significant part of this market being supported by governmental intervention) which leads to further development; changes in tastes are catered for by the appropriate supply; the consumption of luxuries and easy living weaken the social organization; and, as a consequence of all this, the dynasty (civilization or state) then declines and collapses (usually within three or four generations), and the community returns to its original primitive conditions.Footnote 83
This pattern leads to a new question concerning the birth of the dynasty (civilization or state). The leader rises up during the period of anarchy. The recently installed dynasty begins to expand, cities are founded and commerce flourishes. For this process to take place, the community must share a group feeling (’asabiyya) that, through a capillary action, spreads the concepts of loyalty to the leader, of the joining of forces, and the belief in a common destiny. The decline of a dynasty (civilization or state) is not definitive: the vestiges of the civilized era act as embers, which reignite so that the process starts again. The action of the government regarding the taxation system plays a very important role in the process. Tax revenue tends to be greater when the rates are low and the bases very broad. An increase in the rates and restrictions in the bases lead to lower revenues. The model devised by Ibn Khaldun does not allow continuous progress to be seen as a possibility for communities: poverty and wealth flow between upper and lower limits, with fluctuations within a specific margin.
Economic behaviour arises from his concern with civilization (umran), which in this case is equivalent to culture and which describes human social organization. The fluctuations relate to variations in ‘civilization’ that determine the rise and fall of dynasties (civilizations or states).Footnote 84
Ibn Khaldun related the economic phenomena of supply, demand, and prices with the scarcity or abundance of goods, taking it for granted that merchants tried to obtain the highest possible prices for their goods.Footnote 85 He indicated that the demand for luxury goods was inelastic. A secondary phenomenon was the stockpiling of goods with the aim of waiting for the consequent rise in prices. However, Ibn Khaldun warned insistently about the dangers of storage. The level of wages depended on the relations between supply and demand, taking into account that, in certain circumstances, the desire for leisure plays a significant role. In general, prices were higher in cities than in areas that had not achieved a sedentary culture.Footnote 86
Ibn Khaldun also observed that supply only existed when the price covered the costs and was superior to other alternatives available to the seller. Increases in costs due to higher wages, customs duties, or taxes on ‘profits’ were reflected in prices. Ibn Khaldun suggested that demand rather than supply had a greater influence on wages.
On the question of profits, Ibn Khaldun considered that they were essential for the viability of private enterprise and its development and, consequently, contributed to general economic prosperity.Footnote 87 However, he made a distinction in profits between the income obtained by an individual ‘thanks to his effort and strength’ and the income which exceeded this level. He described it as ‘capital accumulation’, greatly exceeding an individual's ‘needs’.Footnote 88
The value of a product depended on the work involved: all or almost all the components of the price of a product consisted of the ‘share of labour’. Certain activities carried out in nomadic areas enabled ‘subsistence and profit’ to be obtained with little work. He condemned abuses such as excessive taxation and the confiscation of property.
On the relationship between status and profit, Ibn Khaldun emphasized the importance of ‘rank’, which was a consequence of having a special relationship with the ruler or the government. The same role was played by ’asabiyah, which resulted in a pyramidal society. The acquisition of rank sometimes required obsequiousness, flattery, and ‘connections’.
As regards surplus, luxury, and capital formation, Ibn Khaldun argued that the development of trade adapted to the supply of luxury goods, and the formation of capital depended on the existence of a production capacity that exceeded the essential needs of society. Nevertheless, Spengler has suggested that, for Ibn Khaldun, the consolidation of an appropriate political order and security enabling the population to coexist in cities would give rise to sufficient division of labour, the advancement of productivity, and the appearance of a market capable of absorbing the growth of social production.Footnote 89 This surplus can be very large and can be used, among other purposes, for ‘capital accumulation’.
Ibn Khaldun did not differentiate the economy from other analytically identifiable components of the system of Islamic society within which the economy operated. His main concern was not the structure of the economy or economic analysis as such. It was the ‘development, illustration and application of a general science of culture that was intended to explain the behaviour, over time, of interrelated economic and non-economic phenomena’.Footnote 90
5. Conclusion
Ibn Khaldun's thinking has been used to transform classical discourse on the ‘standard of civilization’ into a liberal, globalized society. Ideas such as the deregulation of trade or foreign investment are characteristic of the dynamic inequality in a global society. Western states used international (economic) law to impose policies, institutions, and values embedded in Western civilization on non-Western states. However, these policies, institutions, and values belong to Islamic law and Islamic economic policy too.
The value of Ibn Khaldun's thinking is to demonstrate the elements required to achieve sociopolitical and economic viability of a dynasty (civilizations or states). His theory has the empirical and theoretical power not only to explain the consequences of government policies on production and trade, investment, and specialization, but also to predict the survival of civilizations.
Ibn Khaldun was much more than a historian, a political thinker, the creator of the science of civilizations, or a precursor of sociology. He showed his genius in the areas of economic-social phenomena and can be regarded as a protagonist in the universal expansion of the idea of civilization in international law.
The inductive and dynamic reasoning of Ibn Khaldun, which was revolutionary in the fourteenth century,Footnote 91 represented the creation of a new science, the science of history or the science of culture that can explain the origins, rise, decline, and fall of civilizations. As one of the founders of the social sciences, he saw the interdependence and continuous interaction of economic, social, and political imperatives in the development and collapse of civilizations.Footnote 92
It is true that some of Ibn Khaldun's conclusions are obviously contradicted by observed history. Some states (dawlahs) last considerably longer than four generations for reasons other than strong group feeling, while others, including many that are strongly unified by nationalism, fall apart almost instantly. Even today, no definitive theory has yet emerged which can allow for the prediction of future history. However, Ibn Khaldun's work changed the way in which humans understand each other and enabled the study of human behaviour in a logical manner.
Economic and non-economic factors introduced by Ibn Khaldun involve the evolution of the state, cities, and population; the division of labour, wealth accumulation, and economic and social institutions (including money); bureaucracy; and the flourishing of science. For Ibn Khaldun, the role of civilizations is to establish a law and order that is conducive for economic activities.
Ultimately, the strategy of the civilizing process presents itself as a way in which to demonstrate that the history of international law is no more and no less than a history of ‘men with projects’. A re-reading of the theories regarding the concept of civilization is an attempt to discover how people have attempted to make sense of the world in the past and to think about how we organize the puzzle that inevitably results from such a hybridized (and/or fragmented) approach, and about how it will affect the experience of the reader.
