Asian Journal of Social Science: Introduction

Ibn Khaldun has been venerated for several centuries both in the non-Western
and the Western worlds. Yet this veneration has been based on different and,
sometimes, conflicting reasons and interpretations of his work. Indeed, it is
the quality of the vast legacy of great thinkers that allows for opposing inter-
pretations. Plato, Hegel, Kant, Weber and Marx are among the thinkers whose
ideas are interpreted in various and, usually, conflicting ways over the centu-
ries. Each generation critically builds upon previous interpretations to pro-
duce its own generation.
For our generation, Ibn Khaldun has a different meaning than he had for
the thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because we are fac-
ing different questions and are in need of different answers. We cannot help
but put Ibn Khaldun’s legacy to work for our distinct queries. We are required
to do so by not only critically revisiting Ibn Khaldun’s own work, but also
interpretations of his work over the centuries in many different languages.
Th is is the process to which the essays in this volume aim to contribute: they
critically revisit Ibn Khaldun’s own work and the divergent, if not opposing,
interpretations of his work with the purpose of deriving new insights to make
better sense of the world today.
Ibn Khaldun’s fi rst deepest and long-lasting impact can be observed in
Ottoman political thought. Ottoman statesmen, historians and political advi-
sors were among the first to notice the great importance of Ibn Khaldun’s
ideas. It is not, therefore, an accident that the first translation of Ibn Khaldun’s
magnum opus, Th e Muqaddimah, from Arabic to another language was to
Turkish. This translation was among the first books published in the Muslim
world after the arrival of the printing press. Later, as translations to other lan-
guages followed, admiration for Ibn Khaldun continued to grow till today.
Numerous modern Western thinkers have venerated Ibn Khaldun as the
forerunner of modern social scientific thought. Yet calling someone the fore-
runner of a discipline is, in reality, not praise as it implies that his work has