Encounter of History and Modernity

“…it does not belong to rhetoric.”

Ibn Khaldun

The Extent of the Need for Popular Awareness of Ibn Khaldun

Arab academic studies in regards to Ibn Khaldun are not few…and in spite of that, this intellectual in the philosophy of history and sociology in the Arabic Islamic culture has not entered popular awareness…until now. This is because the dominant Arabic culture is still a culture of poetry, eloquence, and rhetoric. Poetry will remain a human emotional, aesthetic need that cannot be forgone. This is not a call for its obliteration.

But for poetry to be our means of dealing with modernity and the world is a disaster…and if “poetry is the record of the Arabs,” then “prose is the language of modernity.” [Poetry was the method Arabs used to record their events, wars, etc.] The German philosopher Friedrich Hegel realized this fact when he pointed out that the importance of reason and scientific thinking in modern times requires a prose that expresses the ideas of the age.

The author of these lines has previously called for the establishment of a new Arab prose upon which modern Arab culture and modern poetry would be based, as the theory of the old school in advancing poetry above prose in the history of nations does not stand up to scrutiny. People talk in their normal life in the form of prose. Poetry comes out of this prose streamlined, refined, and filtered by the tongues of the elite. If prose is not based upon a strong foundation, then poetry, and the writing that is so-called poetry, which is called “poem in prose” in order to cover up this failure, would collapse. And I think that [modern Arab poet] Adonis – who is one of the most prominent advocates of this “new style of writing” – returned to the right path when he warned that it had become “writing without a writer” in a moment of retrospect that needs to be examined carefully.

How right was Tawfiq Al-Hakim when he wondered, “How can you recognize a language without knowing its prose? And I become astonished by how authors like Ibn Khaldun, Al-Tabari, Averroes, and Al-Ghazali…were never presented to us in our studies of Arabic literature in schools.”

It is essential that a new Arab culture, which is the pillar of the awaiting Arab renaissance, be based upon a rational prose that understands modernity and recognizes the world movement, and is capable of conversing with it. This is the road to saving the Arabic language, for which the cries of fear for its destiny in Arabic life are being raised. The Arabic language will only be saved through its return to its rational prose heritage to which Tawfiq Al-Hakim referred when he mentioned examples of it, in addition to adding rational prose similar to it from the intellectual prose of modern times. When Arabic poets comprehend this basic material, they will present poetry on the level of modernity, bypassing the poor translations of foreign writings that they call poetry.

The prose of Ibn Khaldun and his intellect comes in the front line, a necessary entry for the establishment of this new culture.

It is not enough to boast of this man, and then stand at the limits of this boasting. We have to comprehend – rationally and linguistically – his thought and social historical analysis of a reality that still surrounds us. We have to understand it before we can change it…in the right direction.

The culture of the first “[Arab] renaissance” in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century stopped at the revival of poetry and literature, and it missed the impulse for social analysis that represents the essence of Khaldunism and the essence of the schools of modern sociology, history, and political science. This led to a disastrous alienation of the truth of Arabic reality and world reality, which Ibn Khaldun’s approach in our culture represents, the entry for it, looking at history as the world movement.

Arabic culture remaining within its Andalusian memories – and that has occupied a large space in it – will not help the Arabs to understand their reality and their world, which needs a science that “does not belong to rhetoric,” as Ibn Khaldun confirms in introducing his subject.