Genealogy, critique, and decolonization: Ibn Khaldun and moving beyond filling the gaps

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking. It is built on the premise that the decolonizing movement is set to go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies and it can do so by: (1) revising the ‘dismissed’ genealogies that has contributed to the formation of the contemporary classical theory, and (2) thinking creatively in implementing the critical thinking tools to the dismissed scholarship, in an equal manner to the Eurocentric scholarship. To illustrate, it uses the case of Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar of social sciences and historical analysis from 14th Century who is often referred to as the first sociologist. On the one hand, his influence in classical Western thinking is largely dismissed. On the other hand, as a counter-response to this dismissal, the new Islamic revivalist intelligentsia in the Muslim right engage with him in a selective manner that not only rejects that central critical thinking but, even worse, sanctions the local regimes of power, including that local canon. By locating his scholarship to multiple tropes in anthropological theory and reading his evolutionist thinking vis-à-vis the post-colonial literature in anthropology and sociology, I question the limits and possibilities of critical thinking within and beyond the decolonizing movement.