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CHAPTER 1
Ibn Khaldun among the Ruins
He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world's youth, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with fleeting shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.
— Shelley, "Alastor"
The tumult and the shouting dies;
— Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional"
Let us start with a story from The Thousand and One Nights, "The City of Brass." (It should be more correctly rendered as "copper," nuhas, a word whose triconsonantal root can be seen as presaging ill omen, since, among the related words, nahasa means "to make someone unhappy" and manhus means "ill-fated.") It is said that in the days of the Umayyad caliph 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan there was a discussion at his court about the copper jars within which centuries ago the jinn (genies) had been sealed by King Solomon. Whereupon the caliph ordered Musa ibn Nusayr, the governor of North Africa, to outfit an expedition to find one of those jars. After traveling for over a year in the trackless wastes, it became obvious that the expedition was lost. In their wanderings they came to the Black Castle, an abandoned palace that had once been the seat of King Kush of the tribe of 'Ad. Around his tomb they found many tablets bearing writings, which delivered stern messages about "the vicissitudes of life and the transitoriness of the world." For example:
The people and their works lament the empire they have lost.
After further adventures, including an encounter with a mighty jinni (genie), Musa ibn Nusayr's expedition reached the City of Brass. The great wall, which surrounded it, had no gate. Scattered on a neighboring hill they found tablets with more pious warnings for those who would be warned. Early attempts to scale the wall of the city failed, as each of the first ten men delegated to do so smiled on reaching the top of the wall before throwing himself down to his death. But then the spell was broken by a recitation from the Qur'an and so a deceitful and deadly mirage of the beckoning maidens was conjured away. On entering the city, the company made their way through a corpse-strewn labyrinth of streets until they reached the palace and entered a throne room. On the throne there sat a young woman, Queen Tadmur, who appeared to be alive, but on closer examination she turned out to be a corpse whose eyeballs had been filled with glittering quicksilver. Before her throne was a tablet informing them that the city was once ruled by Qush, son of Shaddad ibn 'Ad. It had been the center of a prosperous and happy empire, but suddenly famine had struck and all the wealth of the city could not save the people. Musa ibn Nusayr's company loaded up with lots of treasure and on their return journey they managed also to acquire a copper jar with a jinni sealed inside it. After they had delivered this jar to the caliph in Baghdad, Musa, having seen all that he had seen, decided to become a hermit.
The City of Brass also features in the Muqaddima. It is one of the many ruined or abandoned places in that work. Ibn Khaldun, who grew up in the shadow of ruins, compared them to "faded writing in a book." (This was one of the stock similes of the pre-Islamic poets.) North Africa has an exceptional number of magnificent ancient ruins: Cyrene, Apollonia, Leptis Magna, Carthage, Volubilis, El Jem, Sbeïtla, and many others. It was obvious to a fourteenth-century observer that the region had once been more prosperous and more heavily populated than it was now. "Formerly the whole region between the Sudan (the lands of the blacks in general) and the Mediterranean had been settled. This (fact) is attested by the relics of civilization there, such as monuments, architectural sculpture, and the visible remains of villages and hamlets." Ibn Khaldun wrote repeatedly of North Africa's vanished glories. When he settled down to write the Muqaddima in the Castle of Banu Salama in western Algeria, the place to which he had retreated was in the vicinity of Roman ruins.
From earliest times laments over ruins had featured prominently in Arabic literature. The Jahili (pre-Islamic) poets of Arabia conventionally began their qasidas (odes) with an evocation of an abandoned desert campsite or a ruin and this would furnish the pretext for a lament over past loves and lost youth. In the centuries that followed, the imagery of the desert poets of pre-Islamic times continued to be employed by the urbane poets of 'Abbasid Baghdad and Basra — as in these verses by the ninth-century poet Abu Nuwas, in which, while he writes of the decay of the great city of Basra, it is really his lost youth that he is mourning:
Musalla is no more, desolate the dunes which saw me once,
Basra's decline had begun with the sacking of the city by the rebel Zanj slaves in 871. In the next century it was sacked again by the Qarmatian heretics. Other Islamic cities were later to fall into ruin. Cordova, the capital of Muslim Spain, was sacked by Berber soldiers in 1013. Ibn Hazm, the eleventh-century author of The Ring of the Dove, a wonderful book on the etiquette of love, lamented the devastation of the city he had grown up in:
I stood upon the ruins of our house, its traces wiped out, its signs erased, its familiar spots vanished. Decay had turned its cultivated bloom to sterile waste. In savagery after society, ugliness after beauty, wolves howled and devils played in the haunts of ghosts and dens of wild beasts that once had been luxurious and melodious. Men like swords, damsels like dolls, overflowing with riches beneath an ornamentation so palatial it reminded you of heaven, all were scattered with the change of time. Those elegant apartments, the plaything of destruction, were wilder now than the gaping mouths of lions, announcing the end of the world, revealing the fate of its inhabitants.
Muslim North Africa's heyday had been under the Almohads in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when this Berber dynasty created an empire that extended from the Atlantic to Libyan Tripoli and also included southern and central Spain. In the East, the decay of Baghdad, the capital of the once-mighty 'Abbasid Caliphate, took a slow course, but when the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr visited it in 1184, he remarked that the place was "like statue of a ghost." The sacking of the city by the Mongols in 1258 further contributed to the city's desolation.
RUINS DELIVERING MESSAGES
In fact, as in fiction, ruins were read as messages by pious and thoughtful Muslims. Nothing in this world lasts forever and the piling up of riches would not avail a man when death came for him. It was not by chance that Ibn Khaldun entitled his chronicle the Kitab al-'Ibar. 'Ibar is the plural of 'ibra, meaning "admonition," "warning," "example," or "advice." As in the Qur'an: "Surely in that is an example for men possessed of eyes" (Qur'an 3:13) and "In their story was a warning ('ibra) for those with understanding" (Qur'an 12:11) and "So take warning, you who have sight" (Qur'an 59:2). The Qur'an stressed the importance of historical understanding in the sense of taking lessons from the past. "So relate the story; haply they will reflect" (Qur'an 7:176). "Has there not come to you the tidings of those who were before you — the people of Noah, Ad, Thamood, and of those after them" (Qur'an 7:149). "How many generations We have destroyed after Noah!" (Qur'an 17:17).
As Muhsin Mahdi has written: "The Islamic community was urged to view past events, both reported and experienced, as 'indications' that should awaken its moral sense and enhance its ability to act according to the demands of God: to penetrate behind the apparently meaningless succession of events and discern the ever-present design of the Creator. 'Ibra meant both negative admonition, and positive guidance and direction for future action."
The Qur'an repeatedly refers to past peoples who failed to heed the messages of prophets who were warners. The Deluge destroyed most of Noah's generation. The people of 'Ad, who came after those drowned in the Deluge, are frequently mentioned in the Qur'an. They inhabited a sandy desert between Oman and the Hadramawt. The Prophet Hud was sent as a warner to them, but they did not heed his message and so were doomed. The people of 'Ad were succeeded by the race of Thamud and the Prophet Salih was sent to call them to repentance, but they slaughtered a shecamel that emerged from a rock, which was sent to them as a divine sign, and so too they were doomed. Pharaoh who refused to listen to Moses was another who incurred God's wrath and consequently he was drowned. 'Ad, Thamud, and the Amalekites were known as the "vanished Arabs." In the 'Ibar Ibn Khaldun shows himself to be oddly credulous about these peoples and, for example, he reported without further comment that 'Ad, the ancestor of his race lived for 1,200 years and fathered 4,000 males and 1,000 females.
'Ibra had many layers of meaning and there was also a later mystical sense. According to Jonathan Berkey, it was among other senses "a technical term in the Sufi vocabulary which indicated right guidance in matters concerning good and evil, the distinction between outward form and inward truth, and by extension how souls pass successfully from this world to paradise."
In the opening of the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun presented his life and those of the peoples he has studied as existing in a book; "Our lives' final terms, the dates of which have been fixed for us in the book (of destiny), claim us." History consists both of events and the writing down of those events. Indeed, it is almost as if the events take place in order to be written down in a book, for both the events and the reporting of them serve as 'ibar — warnings or lessons. According to Ibn Khaldun, "the purpose of human beings is not only their worldly welfare. This entire world is trifling and futile. It ends in death and annihilation." The Muqaddima has to be read with this in mind. But, though Ibn Khaldun meditated upon the ruins around him, he took moral messages from them and he did not approach them as an archaeologist. An archaeological approach to ruins lay centuries ahead. (Nor, for that matter, did Ibn Khaldun attempt to apply source-critical techniques to documents.)
'Ibra and related forms of the basic triconsonantal root in Arabic feature prominently in the Nights story of "The City of Brass." When the caliph 'Abd al-Malik heard about the brass jars in which the jinn were imprisoned by Solomon, he expresses a great desire to see such things, for they would be "an example to those who are instructed by such examples" ('ibra li-man-i'tibar). Then, when Musa ibn Nusayr's expeditionary party discuss advancing on the Black Castle, an aged shaikh exclaims, "Let us approach this castle — huwa 'ibra li-man i'tibabara — which is a warning for whoso would be warned." And on one of the tablets in the castle, the party reads "O you who arrive at this place, take warning (i'tabir) from what you see." Inside the Black Castle there "is the last report concerning chieftains who have been gathered in the dust. Death destroyed them and scattered them, and they lost in the dust that which they had gathered." "Sermons in stone" indeed.
The story of "The City of Brass" can be seen as a fantastical prefiguration of the theme that so preoccupied Ibn Khaldun — the ruins of North Africa and the lessons to be learned from the past generations who once dwelt in those now ruined castles and palaces. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? ("Where are those who came before us?") was also a question that often introduced reflections on mortality and the transience of life in medieval Latin poetry. Ibn Khaldun intended his readers to take warning lessons from his history, lessons that would be conducive to Muslim salvation. He wrote of the evidence of former grandeur surviving in an era of chaos and desolation: "Formerly the whole region between the Sudan and the Mediterranean had been settled. This fact is attested by the relics of civilization there, such as monuments, architectural sculpture, and the visible remains of villages and hamlets." He asked himself how such grandeur had given way to desolation. He believed that the desolate state of North Africa in his own time was in large part due to the devastating invasion of the region in the eleventh century by the Egyptian Arab tribal federations of the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym (and we shall return to this topic in chapter 3). Then the question arose, was the passage from imperial grandeur to desolation inevitable?
THE BLACK DEATH AND DESOLATION
Besides featuring in The Thousand and One Nights, "The Story of the City of Brass" also features in The One Hundred and One Nights, a rival story collection that was compiled in North Africa and that, in its oldest recension, may predate The Thousand and One Nights. The story was known as early as the ninth century and, as noted, al-Mas'udi transmitted it in the tenth century. But the historian Jean-Claude Garcin argues, on the basis of numerous details in the story that feature in the version that has come down to us in the nineteenth-century printed editions of the Nights, that this particular version must have been put together no earlier than the fourteenth century. Garcin goes on to argue that the real subject of the story is not the quest for bottled jinn, but rather the desolation of the land and the death that came to so many innocent people. "The Story of the City of Brass" is then a fictional reflection on the Black Death that devastated the Middle East and North Africa in 1348 and perhaps also a commentary on the famines that struck Egypt some decades later. All men are mortal. There is no escaping death. The coming of the Black Death provided the impetus for the retelling of this story — just as it had impelled Ibn Khaldun first to reflect on how the world had changed and then to write the Muqaddima.
To return to ruins, they also featured in Muslim literature as material evidence of bad government. In the course of his discussion of monarchical injustice in chapter 3 of the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun inserted the following fable: The Sassanian king Bahram ibn Bahram, on hearing the cry of an owl, asked the Mobedhan, the chief religious dignitary among the Persians, what the cry meant. The priest replied with a fable: when a male owl wanted to marry a female owl, she demanded twenty ruined villages, so that she could hoot in them. But the male replied that that would be no problem as long as King Bahram continued to rule in the way that he was doing, since the owl would be able to give her a thousand villages. Hearing this, the ashamed King resolved to manage the affairs of his kingdom better.
After Ibn Khaldun had left Granada in 1365, Ibn al-Khatib, the cultivated vizier of the ruler of Granada, wrote to Ibn Khaldun eloquently (but very possibly insincerely) expressing his sadness at his departure and claiming that he now "sought remedy [for loneliness] in morning visits to abandoned ruins." During his own earlier exile in the Maghrib Ibn al-Khatib had produced a melancholy travelogue about his movements around North Africa including many gloomy reflections on the transitoriness of life provoked by the contemplation of the ruins he saw there. (The life and works of Ibn al-Khatib will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2.)
It is hardly possible to overestimate the devastating effects of the Black Death. Throughout his life Ibn Khaldun was to be stalked by tragedies and the first of these occurred in 1348 when the plague reached North Africa from Egypt. At the age of seventeen, Ibn Khaldun lost his parents as well as many of his teachers and friends to the plague. In the Muqaddima, he was to write as follows:
Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems was similarly visited though in accordance with and in proportion to [the East's more affluent] civilization. It was if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whoever is upon it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ibn Khaldun"
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