Light summer reading

Last updated on: June 27, 2015 at 11:32 am by Dan Peterson

Light summer reading 2015-06-27T11:32:31-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A statue of Ibn Khaldun in Tunis

What is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, reading this summer? Why, he’s reading the Muqaddima, by the great fourteenth-century Arab social theorist Ibn Khaldun!

http://fortune.com/2015/06/27/non-business-summer-reading/?xid=soc_socialflow_facebook_FORTUNE

I thank Jabra Ghneim for bringing this to my notice. I could scarcely be more pleased about a summer-reading recommendation than I am with this one.

The Muqaddima is one of the most remarkable books ever written. When I thoroughly reinvented my Humanities 242 class (“Introduction to the Humanities of Islam”) last term, turning it into a kind of small Islamic “great books” course, I tried really, really hard to fit a condensed version of the Muqaddima into the course syllabus. In the end, it didn’t work. The book didn’t fit the emerging theme of the class, and there simply weren’t enough weeks to do it. But my failure to include Ibn Khaldun’s great book remains my biggest disappointment from that redesign, and I may still stick it in for next time.

Three comments from noted British scholars should illustrate why I think this book so important, and so stunning for its age:

The philosopher Robert Flint said of Ibn Khaldun that “as a theorist of history he had no equal in any age or country until Vico appeared, more than three hundred years later. Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him.” The anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner pronounced Ibn Khaldun’s definition of government (“an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself”) the best in the history of political theory. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee called it “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.”

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