The Maghreb Review, Vol. 37, 1, 2012 © The Maghreb Review 2012 This publication is printed on longlife paper BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop: www.maghrebbookshop.com. Our catalogue is also available on our website. ALLEN JAMES FROMHERZ, IBN KHALDUN, LIFE AND TIMES, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, EDINBURGH, 2010, PP.XIII, 190. ‘He did so like his official appointments!’ Ibn Taghribirdī’s verdict on Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt is quoted by Abdessalam Cheddadi in his Ibn Khaldūn. L’homme et le théoricien de la civilisation, in the course of his appraisal of the historian as he appeared to his contemporaries and as he appears to us in his autobiography, the way in which he wished to be seen as politician, judge, scholar, teacher and student of civilisation. In Cheddadi’s appreciation, he is a man naïvely proud of his achievements and pleased with all the praise he received, despite his experience and awareness of the vanity of the world about him. Cheddadi’s source is the autobiography entitled al-Ta‘rīf bi Ibn Khaldūn wa rihlatuhu gharban wa sharqan, edited by Muhammad ibn Tāwīt al-Tanjī, Cairo, 1951, and translated by Cheddadi under the title Le voyage d’Occident et d’Orient. This has been most recently reissued, in 2002, in conjunction with a translation of the more famous Muqaddimah, under the title of Autobiographie in a single volume entitled Le Livre des exemples, Vol.1 of a projected translation of the Kitāb al-‘ibar or Book of Examples, the so-called universal history in which both works originally figured as an introduction and conclusion. Its résumé forms the introduction to Cheddadi’s study of the work as a whole, Ibn Khaldūn. L’homme et le théoricien de la civilisation, in which he expands on the thesis put forward in the preface, ‘Ibn Khaldūn, anthropologue ou historien?’, to his previous translations of extracts from the Kitāb al-‘ibar under the title of Ibn Khaldūn. Peuples et nations du monde. A résumé of the later portion dealing with the author’s life in Egypt was made in English in 1967 by Walter Fischel in his Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, where it introduced a study of the information which the author added to his text of the Kitāb al-‘ibar on the subject of events and religions in the East. Fischel’s work is important for its description of the way in which the Ta‘rīf itself evolved in Egypt along with the text of the ‘Ibar into the work as edited by al-Tanjī, with all the changes that evolution may imply in the author’s attitude to himself and his composition. Cheddadi sees disillusionment with a political career in the Maghrib compensated for by the pose of a strict and incorruptible administrator of the law as Mālikite Qādī of Egypt, a career that ended once again in frustration with the workings of a different regime. Fromherz now takes the 80 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS story through from beginning to end, prefaced by a survey of the late fourteenth, early fifteenth-century context, and followed by his own account of Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of civilisation. In writing the life, Fromherz is out to disprove Franz Rosenthal’s contention in the Introduction to his translation of the Muqaddimah that the predictable absence from the Ta‘rīf of details of family life makes it impossible to gain the kind of rounded picture that would be expected of a modern biography, leaving only the outline of his career. He does not go as far as Natalie Zemon Davis in her speculations about the life of Leo Africanus in her Trickster Travels, but with the aid of references from the Muqaddimah and to Fischel (though not to the Egyptian sources cited by Cheddadi) provides a lively narrative of his subject’s peregrinations and predicaments, with emphasis on the effect of the Black Death, in which his father died, upon Ibn Khaldūn’s perceptions, and on his Sufism, of which much...
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Sep 18, 2012
Simon Luechinger + 1
Open Access
