Ibn Khaldun and His Cycle of Fatalism: A Critique

Abstract

Ibn KIhaldiin's cyclical theory of state-evolution represents the first and, to my knowledge, the only attempt at a scientific explanation of the phenomenon of political instability in the medieval Maghrib. In his attempt to rationalise history, namely, to identify a recognisable pattern in the maze and complexity of historical phenomena, Ibn Khaldfin may be said to have anticipated the speculative philosophers of history, like Hegel and Marx, who saw in history a certain metaphysics, an inner logic or 'underlying plot'. (1) For Ibn Khaldfin as for Hegel and Marx, the denouement of the historical drama obeys an inexorable behavioural pattern or law, even though for the three, this final outcome may be very dissimilar. (2) Such a law of historical change, the law of the Three Stages, Auguste Comte also formulated in the realm of human intellectual development, in his bid to reduce the apparent muddle of 'social phenomena' to some intelligible order or 'one body of homogenous doctrine',(3) just as scientists have done for