Ibn Khaldun Quotes on Politics
Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (Introduction, 1377) — the prologue to the universal history Kitāb al-ʿIbar — gave classical Islamic political philosophy its most ambitious sociological-historical analysis of the rise and fall of dynasties. The central concept of asabiyya (group feeling, social cohesion) frames the cyclical analysis through which a tribally cohesive periphery overthrows a softened urban center, founds a new dynasty, urbanizes, weakens, and is overthrown in turn by the next cohesive periphery — with the corresponding analysis of the economic, religious, and intellectual conditions through which each phase unfolds supplying the principal classical Islamic statement of historical sociology. The framework, recovered for European scholarship in the nineteenth century, shaped subsequent comparative-historical sociology through Toynbee, Gellner, and the broader contemporary engagement with Islamic political thought.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“The vanquished always want to imitate the victor in his distinctive marks, his dress, his occupation, and all his other conditions and customs.”
-
Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“Civilization both begins and ends with desert living.”
-
Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“When civilization reaches the limit of luxury and ease, it begins to decay.”
-
Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“Differences of conditions among people are the result of the different ways in which they make their living.”
-
Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“History is a science, and its subject is the human social organization.”
-
Attributed to Ibn Khaldun:
“A scholar's relationship to politics and politicians is like that of a lamb to a wolf.”
-
“The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage. Other persons who accept the status of slave do so as a means of attaining high rank, or power, or wealth, as is the case with the Mameluke Turks in the East and with those Franks and Galicians who enter the service of the state [in Spain].”
As quoted in Bernard Lewis , Race and Color in Islam, Harper and Row, 1970, quote on page 38. The brackets are displayed by Lewis.