Ibn Khaldun and Anthropology: The Failure of Methodology in the Post 9/11 World

Abstract

Return of has much for which to thank Osama bin Laden. After decades of criticism, anthropology was on the ropes not long ago. Its founding fathers and mothers were discredited: Bronislaw Malinowski for lusting after young natives, and Margaret Mead for cooking up ethnographic accounts. Its own practitioners despaired and predicted The End of Anthropology (title of Worsley 1966; see also Banaji 1970). When the field appeared at its weakest, the powerful new voice of Edward Said emerged to denounce it as tainted by the dreaded word Orientalism (Said 1978). Perhaps the unkindest cut was that anthropology was not even seen as a bulldog in the service of the Western imperialists but rather as a mere puppy. Students of anthropology wandered aimlessly, sometimes into postmodernist literary conceit and sometimes into autobiographical excess. Like John Keats' knight in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, anthropology appeared to be ailing, alone and palely loitering. September 11, 2001, changed all that. main interests of anthropology, ideas of ethnicity, group loyalty, honor, revenge, suicide, tribal code, and the conflict between what anthropologists call the Great Tradition of world religions and their local practice, or the Little Tradition, were being discussed everywhere. Perhaps people were not even aware tha they were discussing these issues as they were identified with traditional, even primitive societies, and therefore discredited; now they were front-page news. B t while Americans asked the right questions, such as Why do Muslims hate us? and Why is there so much violence coming from Muslim societies? they were provided the wrong answers. Some Americans said it was because Muslims hated American's free-