Ibn Khaldun

Their big question

Why do strong groups fall apart?

Ibn Khaldun asked a question nobody had asked in quite that form: not what happened, but why people’s lives together have a shape.

His answer starts with something he called asabiyya — usually translated as group feeling, or solidarity. A group with strong asabiyya will do hard things together in a desert or a crisis; they take risks because they trust each other. That is how dynasties get started. Then they win. Then they live in cities, in comfort, with wealth and softness and disagreements about who is owed what. And the feeling that got them there fades, because nobody needs it any more. Then somebody hungrier arrives.

He was careful to say he was not describing fate. He was describing a pattern he had watched three times in person, and he wanted it tested against evidence rather than repeated as a story. The opening of his book is a lecture to historians about how to check a claim: could this really have happened, given the size of the army, the state of the roads, the taxes needed to pay for it?

What makes him unusual is the combination. He was not a moralist telling rulers to be virtuous, and not a religious writer describing providence. He was looking for the machinery — what materially makes societies hold together and come apart. A great deal of modern sociology and economics is still arguing with him, six centuries later.

“History is a record of human society — and it is full of errors, so it must be tested.”

A summary of the argument that opens his Muqaddimah, where he sets out rules for checking whether a reported event is even possible.

Three things worth knowing

• His main book opens by telling historians that most of what they repeat is untrue, and setting out rules for checking it.
• He argued cities and dynasties rise on the back of a shared solidarity he called asabiyya, and then soften and fall once they get comfortable.
• He served as an adviser to rulers in several countries, was imprisoned at least once, and wrote much of his work while living quietly in a castle under the protection of a tribe.

Try it — think like Ibn

Pick a friend group, a club or a family and draw its story as a curve with three points: where it started, where it is now, and where you think it goes next. Then say what would have to happen to change the last point.

We have no portrait of Ibn that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.