Two essays: I. The desert and the city: reading the history of civilisation in Ibn Khaldun after Edward Gibbon. II. Rational enthusiasm and angelicality: the concept of prophecy in Ibn Khaldun and Edward Gibbon

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but to imagine what Gibbon would have said of Ibn Khaldun and to understand each the better by doing so; in particular, to show how the former would have responded to the latter as he has become known to us since the twentieth century.