Ibn Khaldun, in spite of himself

摘要

One of the pressing motives of writing the present article is to call to attention the following considerations while approaching Ibn Khaldun by our contemporaries. First, one of the obstacles to a safe understanding of Ibn Khaldun is our contemporaries' attempt to 'steer' his genius and 'squeeze' it just to fit a particular modern trend - and this in spite of Ibn Khaldun himself. Second, Ibn Khaldun has been unjustly torn between his contemporaries and our contemporaries. Some of our contemporaries, on the one hand, have been so insisting in giving him a one-way ticket to the modern age that they have denied him even the 'right' to commit mistakes that belong to his age. Some of his contemporaries, on the other hand, were so beyond the level of his far-reaching horizons and deep insights that they made him the butt of their plotting and even excommunication, thus denying him the right to transcend the intellectual confines of his time. Yes, Ibn Khaldun was ahead of his time; still, he was a scholar of his time. It is by putting him and his works into their context that he comes out clearly as a genius.