Ibn Khaldun in the 21st Century

On the political economy of knowledge, institutions, and civilisational power.

“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.”
— G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. We stand, in the 21st century, at sufficient distance from the civilisational upheavals of the modern period to see, with a clarity unavailable to those who lived through them, the causes of our contemporary malaise. And, perhaps, to deduce the means by which we break out of what has become, in large measure, a self-imposed condition. It is in this spirit of retrospection that we turn to Ibn Khaldun—to think with him, and where necessary, beyond him.

A man who spent his life observing the rise and fall of dynasties across the Maghrib and Mashriq, who served and was betrayed by rulers from Fez to Cairo, who watched the armies of Timur approach Damascus and talked his way out of a siege—such a man, transported to the 21st century, would find more familiar than we might expect. The surface would bewilder: the speed, the density, the sheer volume of humanity pressed into cities he could not have imagined. But the logic of power would not be wholly alien to Ibn Khaldun. States still extract surplus from productive populations. Elites still cycle through vigour, complacency, and decline. Solidarity still coheres around kinship, sect, and a shared narrative, and still dissolves when the material conditions that sustain it give way. He would, for example, see in the Gulf monarchies a familiar pattern of desert peoples enriched by windfall, their asabiyyah intact in the first generation, eroding as wealth softens the habits that produced cohesion. He would see in the American republic something like the late stages of his cycle, wherein a polity whose founding solidarity has fragmented into factional competition, its elites more occupied with extraction than with maintaining the commonwealth. Ibn Khaldun’s circle of justice—that taxes depend on prosperity, prosperity on good governance, and good governance on a just sovereign—remains an operational description of what happens when states forget that their revenue ultimately depends on their subjects’ productive capacity.

And yet there would be much new to him. His theory of political economy presumed agrarian production, courtly redistribution, and cycles of dynastic rise and decline measured in generations. It did not and could not account for industrial capitalism, the capacity of modern states to sustain themselves through manufactured surplus rather than land revenue alone, financialisation as a force capable of decoupling wealth from production entirely, or for the nation-state as a form of political organisation that derives legitimacy not from dynastic asabiyyah but from popular sovereignty and bureaucratic rationality. The Bedouin-sedentary dialectic, so powerful in explaining the political dynamics of the medieval Maghrib, has no obvious purchase on the rise of East Asian developmental states or the internal logic of European welfare capitalism. Ibn Khaldun, if he were alive today and the thinker we claim him to be, would not cling to categories forged in 14th-century North Africa. He would update his priors as he observed the new forces driving man, society, and civilisation.

The exercise of placing Ibn Khaldun in the 21st century is a way of identifying where six centuries of subsequent development expose the limits of a 14th-century framework, and of treating those limits not as failures but as frontiers. The gaps in Ibn Khaldun’s thought, measured against the world as it now operates, mark the territory where new theory is needed to upgrade our fundamental assumptions about the nature of civilisation in the age of industrialisation.

But the exercise is also a way of asking a harder question. An Ibn Khaldun of the 21st century would be very interesting. But would he even be possible? And even if he were possible, in what direction would his ideas develop, and towards what material questions of society and civilisation would they be applied?

The Political Economy of Knowledge

The answer lies not in Ibn Khaldun the man but in the civilisation around him—or rather, in what his civilisation lacked. In his world, Ibn Khaldun’s brilliance was not the only scarce resource. His civilisation lacked the institutional infrastructure through which individual brilliance could be captured and compounded across generations.

Consider the contrast between the Islamicate institutions of knowledge production and what emerged in Europe over the centuries following Ibn Khaldun’s death. The European university, which had begun forming as loose guilds of scholars after the 12th century in European cities such as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, evolved into something without precedent in the history of organised knowledge: a self-governing corporation with legal personhood, endowed revenues independent of any single patron, and a continuous institutional existence that survived the death of every individual within it. The University of Oxford did not depend on the favour of any particular king, and the generational succession of teachers and students continued almost unabated throughout the ages. Knowledge accumulated not because Europeans were more intelligent than their contemporaries elsewhere, but because they had built, haltingly, imperfectly, and often for reasons unrelated to the pursuit of truth, institutions whose structure made accumulation possible.

Contrary to revisionists’ valiant attempts to claim otherwise, Islamic civilisation possessed nothing equivalent. The University of al-Qarawiyyin is often erroneously described as a university, yet it lacked the institutional trappings, research focus, or continuity of the European model. The madrasa, for all its sophistication, was typically endowed by a specific patron, organised around a specific scholar or legal school, and subject to the vicissitudes of dynastic politics in ways that European universities, with their corporate charters and independent endowments, increasingly were not. Teaching remained centred on the personalities of great scholars, and their lives were always precariously dependent on the support of a wealthy patron.

Ibn Khaldun himself repeatedly experienced the misfortunes of this lack of institutionalisation: his fortunes rose and collapsed with each successive court that employed him, from the Marinids to the Hafsids to the Mamluks. His intellectual project was, in the most literal sense, dependent on political favour. The Muqaddimah was written during a period of enforced retreat at the castle of Ibn Salama, not within an institution designed for sustained inquiry, but in the margins of a political career that had temporarily stalled.

This structural deficit compounded over time. In the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires presided over considerable cultural production, the mechanisms by which knowledge could scale remained personalised, courtly, and fragile. The republic of letters that was taking shape across the English Channel and the Rhine—that extraordinary network of correspondence, publication, and mutual criticism connecting Erasmus to More, Leibniz to Newton, Voltaire to d’Alembert—had no Islamic analogue. Nor was there something akin to the Baconian revolution in method, which transformed European knowledge production from a contemplative exercise into an applied, experimental, and self-correcting enterprise. Francis Bacon’s insight was, after all, organisational: knowledge should be pursued collectively and systematically in the service of practical power over nature. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was the institutional embodiment of that insight: a permanent body for the collaborative production and verification of knowledge, independent of court patronage, transmitting its methods and findings across generations.

The consequences of the divergence between these modes of knowledge production were not immediately visible. In the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire remained militarily formidable and administratively sophisticated; Ottoman scholars read and commented on the Muqaddimah, and a Khaldunian revival occurred among historians such as Katip Çelebi and Naima. But this revival remained literary and contemplative rather than institutional and applied. No one built a research programme around Khaldun’s cyclical theory of state formation. No one tested his propositions against new data, refined his categories, or extended his framework into domains he had not considered. The ideas were admired, but they were not applied.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, a work that contained, as many scholars have since observed, ideas on the division of labour, the role of the state in economic life, and the relationship between production and taxation that Ibn Khaldun had articulated nearly four centuries earlier. But Smith did not write in a vacuum. He wrote within the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was itself embedded within a vast and increasingly complexifying ecosystem of universities, journals, learned societies, and public discourse. His work was immediately debated, critiqued, extended, and applied. Smith became one of the foundations upon which successive generations built increasingly elaborate structures of knowledge that would power their civilisation to new heights of material and intellectual achievement.

Thus, the rise of the European political economy of knowledge depended on improvements in material conditions, such as patronage structures, fiscal capacity, institutional autonomy, and elite continuity. The question is why the extraordinary analytical traditions that existed within Islamic civilisation—of which Ibn Khaldun is the most salient but by no means the only example—never generated the self-sustaining institutional ecosystems that would have allowed them to compound. And here the explanation cannot be cultural or philosophical in the first instance. We require a material analysis of the political economy of knowledge in Islamic civilisation.

Scholars produced knowledge. But scholars required patronage, and patronage required courts, and courts required stable polities, and stable polities required—as Ibn Khaldun himself would have insisted—the asabiyyah and fiscal capacity to sustain complex administration over time. When any link in this chain broke, knowledge production ceased because the material conditions for its continuation had been withdrawn. Europe’s advantage was not initially superior ideas (although many of them eventually came to be thus) but rather a superior mechanism for insulating knowledge production from the volatility of political life. The endowed college, tenured professorship, and the chartered learned society were, at bottom, technologies for decoupling intellectual inquiry from the patronage cycle. They did not eliminate dependence on wealth and power—no institution does—but they introduced sufficient autonomy that a change of regime did not mean a change of research programme. Ibn Khaldun had no access to such technologies. While Islamic civilisation continued to feature the creation of educational institutions, legions of seminary graduates, scholarly output, and traditions of knowledge, it never operated at the scale and intensity of what emerged in Europe after the 16th and 17th centuries.

It was at the turn of the 19th century when the scale of the problem began to be acknowledged by Muslim statesmen, intellectuals, and scholars. They sought to reform their stagnant institutions and immediately set about creating a new, industrial-era political economy of knowledge. This took the form of attempts to synthesise new, culturally hybrid institutions and technologies fit for Islamicate culture, such as the printing press, the research university, translation houses, theatrical productions, military and fiscal development, and the flowering of an (albeit temporary) network of intellectual and cultural discourse across Islamic civilisation. This imperfect process was halted when the triple catastrophes of the 20th century arrived. The Ottoman dissolution, Communist conquest across Muslim Eurasia, and the partition of the Indian subcontinent annihilated the elite classes, the patronage networks, and the institutional structures that sustained what remained of Islamic knowledge production. Every link was shattered simultaneously. Thus, we live in the ruins of this valiant effort, largely ignorant of it.

In the 21st Century

What, then, of the present? The Muslim world today is not without scholars, universities, or research output. But to move from the existence of these things to the claim that an ecosystem of knowledge production exists—in the sense that it exists in North America, or Western Europe, or increasingly in East Asia—is to confuse the presence of individual components with the functioning of a system. A country may possess universities without possessing a tradition of inquiry. It may produce PhDs without producing knowledge. It may fund research without creating the conditions for research findings to accumulate into something greater than the sum of their parts.

Pre-industrial Islamic civilisation did not lack brilliant minds, but rather lacked the institutional machinery to compound their brilliance. The Muslim world of the 21st century faces, in structural terms, the same deficit, complicated immeasurably by the fact that the 20th century destroyed what institutional continuity remained. The universities that exist across the Arab world, Türkiye, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia are largely post-colonial creations modelled on European or American templates, staffed by scholars trained in Western doctoral programmes, operating within disciplinary frameworks developed elsewhere, publishing in journals edited elsewhere, and seeking validation from accrediting bodies located elsewhere. A scholar at a Gulf university, handsomely compensated and lightly taught, nonetheless works within a system where academic freedom is circumscribed by political sensitivities, institutional continuity depends on the preferences of a ruling family, and the research agenda is shaped more by the desire for international rankings than by any indigenous tradition of inquiry demanding answers to questions that arise from local conditions. This is not a judgment on the intelligence of individuals within these institutions, but on the material conditions under which they operate. The patronage problem that plagued Ibn Khaldun remains unsolved. This time, the court has been replaced by the ministry, and the sultan’s favour by the funding council’s priorities; knowledge production is permission-gated rather than self-sustaining and institutionally sovereign.

Yet though the conditions we labour under are unpropitious, this is not an excuse for inaction. The triple rupture of the 20th century was inflicted from without. The failure to rebuild is an internal affair. 80 years have passed since the last of those catastrophes. In that time, the Muslim world acquired enormous financial resources, established hundreds of universities, and sent tens of thousands of students to the finest institutions in Europe and America. The material prerequisites for reconstruction exist. What does not exist is the will and understanding to deploy those resources toward the creation of genuinely self-sustaining ecosystems of knowledge production rather than toward the acquisition of institutional ornaments.

The conventional approach to Ibn Khaldun’s work in the contemporary Muslim world is exegetical. Scholars write commentaries on the Muqaddimah, and conferences are held to celebrate his contributions. We apply his specific categories—asabiyyah, the dynastic cycle, the Bedouin-sedentary dialectic—as though they were timeless laws requiring only minor updating. Ibn Khaldun’s name is invoked as proof that Islamic civilisation once produced towering intellects, which it did, and which no serious person disputes. But this mode of engagement is itself a symptom of the problem it purports to address. To endlessly revisit the Muqaddimah is to treat a great work as a ceiling rather than a floor. Smith’s ideas were honoured by extension, critique, and eventual supersession. No equivalent process has occurred with Ibn Khaldun, because no institutional ecosystem exists within which such a process could occur.

The Khaldunian approach to the 21st century is to be found in Ibn Khaldun’s method, what he called Ilm al-Umran, or the “science of civilisation”: the insistence on observing social reality as it actually operates before philosophical commitments that suggest how it ought to operate, the willingness to theorise from evidence rather than from authority, the recognition that political, economic, and cultural life are governed by patterns susceptible to rational analysis.

An Industrial Ilm al-Umran

What would this look like in practice? Ideally, not another conference on Ibn Khaldun’s contributions to sociology, an edited volume comparing the Muqaddimah to The Wealth of Nations, or another curriculum that teaches Islamic intellectual history as a museum exhibit. It would look like the creation of institutions whose entire purpose is the production of new knowledge: schools of political economy that train scholars to theorise from the conditions of Muslim-majority societies rather than to import frameworks wholesale from Chicago or Cambridge; research programmes that take the questions Ibn Khaldun raised about solidarity, state capacity, the relationship between production and political order, and pursue them with the methodological tools available to the 21st century; centres of inquiry independent enough from state patronage to survive a change of minister, and embedded enough in their societies to address questions that matter locally rather than questions that impress internationally. We could even call this an industrial Ilm al-Umran that becomes the foundation of an entire political economy of knowledge, addressing questions in economics, law, sociology, political philosophy, and the material sciences, among other things.

This is how every civilisation that produces knowledge at scale has already built. The great American research universities were built over generations and centuries by people who understood that national and civilisational power required an institutional base for sustained intellectual production. The same is true of the German research university before them, and of the Chinese investment in scientific infrastructure that is bearing fruit today. These are material achievements, not philosophical ones. They require money, political will, and a class of people who understand what is at stake.

Ibn Khaldun, observing all of this, would note, perhaps with the wry detachment of a man who had seen too many courts rise and fall to be sentimental about any of them, that his own legacy is the proof. The Muqaddimah remains, after six centuries, one of the most penetrating works of social analysis ever written. That it has not been surpassed after such a great expanse of time should not induce complacency. It is our turn to build on and surpass Ibn Khaldun’s contribution to the body of human knowledge.

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Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

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