Now the dynasty has ended | Ibn Khaldun goes further, because the cyclical succession of dynasties that he analyses do not merely effect political history but also impact on social and economic history |
---|---|
One thing contains the clue to another | Also, know something about modern science because he says some interesting things that are downright incorrect |
If a 20th century update had existed it certainly would have "Undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place.
7Some of their students will be grateful they did | One is not supposed to ask if the caliphate was a victim of his four-generation rule, and the royal authority acquired by Mu'awiyah was too much to resist |
---|---|
At this time, it belongs to the Turkomans and is ruled by Ibn Uthman the Ottomans | He really steps back and looks at the world arou I read this book because my History of Islam professor recommended it in a class last fall |
Have we passed our four generation limit, and will we be swept away by superior group feeling of tribes from the desert, or by the royal authority of a rising China? I think I would have found school maths easier if the questions had been posed as practical carpentry problems.
28They never differed among themselves except for good reasons | Not the case, Ibn Khaldun and perhaps with the help of the translator has a curious nature and a light humor in his work |
---|---|
This book is sheer madness and he says he wrote it in five months | Maddeningly at one moment he implies that Islamic civilisation is undergoing a relative decline while the European Christian and Chinese civilisations are in a phases of upward growth but the idea is not explored explicitly |
Over the last three centuries, Ibn Khaldun has been rediscovered as a profoundly prescient political scientist, philosopher of history and forerunner of sociology -- one of the great thinkers of the Muslim world.
19