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Abd ar-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406)
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All about Abd ar-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn Khaldun Ibn Khaldun: His Life and Work |
"Among the most oppressive measures, and the ones most deeply harming society, is the compelling of subjects to perform forced work unjustly. For labour is a commodity, as we shall show later, in as much as incomes and profits represent value of labour of their recipients [...] nay most men have no source of income other than their labour. If, therefore, they should be forced to do work other than that for which they have been trained, or made to do forced work in their own occupation, they would lose the fruit of their labour and be deprived of the greater part, nay of the whole, of their income." Ibn Khaldun, who received a broad education in Arabic, interpretation of the Koran, jurisprudence and poetry, served a number of Arab rulers in Tunis, Fez, Granada, Damascus and Cairo as courtier, jurist and statesman. As a political adviser with an exceptionally broad overview of different Muslim countries he developed outstanding skills in observing and analyzing the economic, political and social developments of his time. His work has been rediscovered at the beginning of the 19th century by Arab and European scholars. Where many Arabs saw in him a source of inspiration for a new definition of their identity and their relations with the West, liberals tend to interpret Ibn Khaldun as a shining representative of the rationalistic Islamic traditions and forerunner of economic and sociological theory. Some scholars call Ibn Khaldun the real „father of economics“ or „father of modern social science“ and claim that his ideas have been more or less reinvented four centuries later by thinkers like Adam Smith or David Ricardo, and later by Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes. Apart from such a difficult comparison, the depth and analytical strength of his works is certainly most impressive. Especially in his „Muqaddima“, a sort of preliminary discourse to his later historiographical treatise, Ibn Khaldun developed a theory of labour, including most interesting ideas about the division of labour, a theory of taxation and covers many more areas which come across as very „modern“. What makes Ibn Khaldun particularly interesting for Liberals today is his strong case for a free economy and for freedom of choice as the best basis for a stable country, strong by social cohesion and not by political power alone. He also inspires many Liberals in the Muslim world who suffer under the prevailing economic and political restrictions. Literature:
Adapted from http://www.fnst.org/libinst/pdf/Ibn_Khaldoun.pdf. |
