Ibn Khaldun Quotes on Knowledge
Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), the Tunisian historian and judge whose Muqaddima (Prolegomena to the Universal History, 1377) gave fourteenth-century Islamic thought its founding treatise on the science of human civilization (ʿilm al-ʿumrān), defended the case that the patterns of political and cultural history are accessible to a genuine science only through the careful comparative analysis of social conditions, climates, modes of subsistence, and the rise and fall of group feeling (ʿaṣabiyya). The framework supplies the principal pre-modern statement of what the modern disciplines would call sociology of knowledge — the systematic dependence of intellectual production on the surrounding social and economic conditions of the civilization that produces it.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“History is a science, and its subject is the human social organization.”
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Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“A scholar's relationship to politics and politicians is like that of a lamb to a wolf.”
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“When civilization [population] increases, the available labor again increases. In turn, luxury again increases in correspondence with the increasing profit, and the customs and needs of luxury increase. Crafts are created to obtain luxury products. The value realized from them increases, and, as a result, profits are again multiplied in the town. Production there is thriving even more than before.”
Muqaddimah , 2:272–73 quoted in Weiss (1995), p. 30 -
“The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks , have come down to us, because they were translated through Al-Ma'mun 's efforts. He was successful in this direction because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection.”
Wikiquote -
“Eventually, Aristotle appeared among the Greeks. He improved the methods of logic and systematized its problems and details. He assigned to logic its proper place as the first philosophical discipline and the introduction to philosophy. Therefore he is called the First Teacher .”
Muqaddimah , Translated by Franz Rosenthal, p. 39 and p. 383, Princeton University Press, 1981. -
“It should be known that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.”
Muqaddimah(1377) | Muqaddimah , Translated by Franz Rosenthal, p. 355, Princeton University Press, 2020.