The North African historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whose family once held significant positions in Andalusia and migrated to Tunis after the fall of Seville during the Reconquista, is arguably the most influential and well-known Muslim historian/philosopher of the medieval period if one considers his impact today. His ideas were rarely recognized in his own time. However, centuries before the European social scientists developed a real interest in him in the nineteenth century as the first proper social scientist (some say sociologist), his ideas were used and appropriated by various Muslim scholars in the early modern age.
More than thirty-five years ago, in an influential article on the reception of Ibn Khaldun's ideas on Ottoman men of letters, Cornell Fleischer argued that "the Muqaddimah, while influential, hardly revolutionized Ottoman historical writing.” Fleischer argued that many of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman intellectuals used Ibn Khaldun because his dynastic cyclism fit the Ottoman intellectuals home-grown “declinism.” To substantiate his arguments, Fleischer studied how the sixteenth-century Ottoman historian Mustafa Ali produced ideas similar to the North African historian, even though he never read Muqaddimah. In the next century or so, Mustafa Ali's predecessors adopted many of his ideas; Mustafa Naima is a well-known example of Khaldunian influence in the eighteenth century.
The papers in this panel survey through the entire span of the Ottoman Empire in the hopes of tracing the Ibn Khaldunian influences on the Ottoman intellectuals. First two papers deal with the Ibn Khaldunian influence in the early modern period of the Ottoman Empire. The first of those studies Tursun Beg’s famous history of Mehmed II, Tarihul Ebulfeth, as a possible early penetration of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas in the initial stages of the Ottoman Empire. The second of the early modern papers expands the ibn Khaldunian influence among the Ottoman intellectuals by taking it beyond Ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic cycles. This paper shows how Katip Celebi used Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of science as well as his crucial ideas on the leadership of the Muslim community. The next three papers study the influence of Ibn Khaldun on the late Ottoman intellectuals namely Mahmud Nedim Pasha, Abdurrahman Seref Efendi, and Namik Kemal. In each of these cases, Ottoman intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th century, found a suitable home in Khaldun’s ideas to both criticize their society and state and offer his ideas as a conduit for progress and social change. The papers collectively address how a crucial intellectual tradition, born out of medieval North Africa, found a true home in Ottoman intellectual circles as the empire went through a seismic shift from the early modern to the modern period.
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Prof. Kenan Inan
Tursun Bey’s Tarih-i Ebü’l-Feth (“History of the Father of Conquest”) is not a systematic chronicle of events but essentially a panegyric on the reigns of Mehmed II and of its dedicatee Bayezid II. In his introduction, Tursun states that he composed his book using either his own experiences of events or the information which was ‘common among the people’. However, we know that Tursun used written sources. The introduction can be placed in the tradition of ‘Mirrors for Princes’ literature, in which an imperial servant-in our case Tursun Bey- offers advice on ruler ship to the reigning Sultan. His use of the Ahlak-? Nas?ri of Nas?ruddin Tusi and possible use of the Chahar Makala of Nizami-i Arudi proves his familiarity with this literary genre.
Tursun Bey’s ideas on the kinds of human settlement, sovereignty and law show some similarities with that of Ibn-i Haldun mentioned in Mukaddime. Haldun discusses that human being live together and there are differences in the behaviours of the nations and societies. However, the reason of this difference is to help each other in order to make a living. Tursun Bey also mentions that human being created to live together and this is called temeddün (becoming civilized). He names the kinds of temeddün as ?ehir (city), köy (village) and oba (nomad life).
The compilation of Tursun Bey’s History coincides with the compilation of the Kanunname of Mehmed II in the early years of Bayezid II’s reign, and the Preface appears to be in part a justification of the Kanunmame. The reason for kanun-making is, he states, nizam-? alemi zahir içün (to bring order to the world). He calls these laws siyaset-i sultani ve yasa?-? padi?ahi (Sultanic law and prohibition of the Sultan) and örf (customary law). He makes clear that these laws are not based on ?eriat (religious laws), but on reason, and contrasts them with siyaset-i ilahi (divine government). Similar to some of the points mentioned above Ibn-i Haldun also tells that human being needs a hakim (sovereign) and he sometimes implements religious orders sent by God and he sometimes acts according to siyaset-i akl (rational politics). Both politics are necessary to have the expected civilization.
The paper will try to analyse the reason of the similarities between two authors.
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Dr. Vefa Erginbas
In a 1983 article on the reception of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas on Ottoman men of letters, Cornell Fleischer argued “the Muqaddimah, while influential, hardly revolutionized Ottoman historical writing. Rather, it was accorded a warm reception by thinkers who found its ideas at once relevant and familiar, because conceptions of sovereignty and of the growth and decay of dynastic states very similar to those of Ibn Khaldun had already been articulated in Ottoman historical literature.” Although Fleischer’s statement might well be true for many of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century men of letters, whose fortunes were tied to the prosperity and order of the Ottoman Empire, a curious mind wonders if the Ottoman intellectuals only utilized Ibn Khaldun’s ideas for practical purposes. To substantiate his arguments Fleischer used Mustafa Ali. Fleischer argued that even though Ali never read Muqaddimah, he posited similar views to him and many of his ideas were adopted by his predecessors. There is no ground to deny that Ibn Khaldun’s ideas of dynastic cycles were very much liked by the Ottoman treatises that dealt with what they called as the “decline” of the Ottoman Empire. This paper argues that influential Ottoman Encyclopedist of the 17th century Katip Celebi used Ibn Khaldun differently than many of his contemporaries. Even though he also reserved a section to Ibn Khaldun’s ideas of rising and fall of the dynasties, Celebi utilized his philosophy of history, his crucial ideas about the imamate, and his most famous concept “asabiyah” or group feeling. This paper suggests that Ibn Khaldun did indeed penetrate Ottoman intellectual circles with a plethora of his influential ideas not just with his dynastic cyclism. The fact that his ideas were circulated and propagated by the utmost intellectual of the 17th century points to the significance and impact of Ibn Khaldun on the Ottoman intellectuals of the early modern world.
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Dr. Uygar Aydemir
There appears to be a division between studies on treatises of Ottoman political philosophy written in the nineteenth century and studies on those produced in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the earlier texts are evaluated in terms of classical Islamic and Ibn Khaldunian concepts, the nineteenth century ones are assessed in terms of how they engage with modernity. However, there are examples produced in the nineteenth century that transcend this binary approach and call for a different evaluation. One of them is Ottoman statesman Mahmud Nedim Pasha’s (1817-1883) political credo, Ayine-i Devlet. Being written following the enthronement of Abdülaziz in 1861, Ayine-i Devlet was Mahmud Nedim’s advice for the Sultan in which he discussed the reasons for what he saw as the acceleration of the Empire’s decline over the last decades. Although so far it has been represented as a text that demonstrated its author’s anti-reformist tendencies, Ayine-i Devlet is, in fact, a self-conscious reinterpretation of a Khaldunian understanding of political power in a modern context. Mahmud Nedim was particularly influenced by Ibn Khaldun in his approach to the political relations between the bureaucracy and the Sultan as well as in his periodization of historical stages of the Ottoman Empire. Since Mahmud Nedim’s main emphasis was on the fallacies of newly fledgling modern bureaucracy, his criticism at times even gains a Weberian character, resulting in a remarkable treatise in which an interpretation of Ibn Khaldun in the 1860s heralded several issues modern sociologists would begin discussing not until half a century later.
This paper discusses Mahmud Nedim’s political views on the Ottoman dynasty, autocracy, bureaucracy, history and the rule of law by demonstrating that they have their roots in classical Ottoman political philosophy and Khaldunian concepts as well as reflecting on their modern nature. This discussion is conducted through an analysis of the comparison of the political and administrative system Mahmud Nedim draws between the nineteenth-century Europe and the different stages of the Ottoman Empire according to his own periodization of Ottoman history.
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Dr. Madeleine Elfenbein
The late Ottoman dissident author Namik Kemal (1840-1888) is known to have read the works of contemporary European historians, and is understood to have reflected their influence in his own historical writings. This engagement has traditionally been depicted as a turn away from the Ottoman historiographical tradition and toward a “modern” (read: nationalist) approach to writing history, despite the resonances between these European authors’ approaches and those of classical Ottoman authors, including many regarded as heirs to the Khaldunist tradition. This paper proposes to explore these resonances in an examination of Namik Kemal’s historical writings, focusing on the ways in which both traditions can be seen to converge in Namik Kemal’s broadly sourced accounts of Ottoman and world history.
Through an analysis of Kemal’s well-known essays for the journal Ibret, written in 1872, as well as the lesser-known historical writing he undertook in the 1880s, one aim of the paper is to explore the degree to which Namik Kemal can be situated within an explicitly or implicitly Khaldunist tradition. I focus on the ways in which Kemal’s writings reflect a renewed transnational interest in Ibn Khaldun, which manifested in the publication of translations in Swedish and French from 1840 onward and the appearance of printed editions of his original Arabic manuscript in France and Egypt, reflecting the author’s relevance to both Middle Eastern and European scholars. I also wish to place this engagement alongside Namik Kemal’s fascination with the Enlightenment tradition of world history embodied in the writings of the Comte de Volney (1757–1820), as well as the Romantic nationalist historiography of the French author Jules Michelet (1798-1874) and the Italian author Silvio Pellico (1789-1854). By placing these authors in the company of Ibn Khaldun and his Ottoman successors as intellectual resources for Namik Kemal, I consider how dissident historiography became a site for the convergence of the Islamic and European scholarly traditions in the nineteenth century. My analysis highlights how Namik Kemal drew on both these traditions to advance a distinct Young Ottoman agenda of radical political change coupled with robust Ottoman sovereignty.
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Dr. Yeliz Cavus
Starting with the mid-nineteenth century, a new generation of Ottoman historians began to discuss the Ottoman past with a modern historical-mindedness as they engaged with new concepts and methods. These historians aimed to incorporate comparative approaches and different periodization models, as well as new subjects of interest into the conventional history writing. By closely following the changes in European historiographical trends, they aimed to establish history as a scientific discipline in the Ottoman realm. These changing trends in history writing, however, did not mean a complete rupture from traditional practices. Instead, nineteenth-century historians also sought reconciliation with the historians of previous generation as well as the major texts that influenced Ottoman historical writing. Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, a translation of which was completed in the nineteenth century, was one of the most influential texts that continued to shape Ottoman historical thought during this period.
Abdurrahman ?eref Efendi (d. 1925) was among the most prominent members of the new generation of Ottoman historians who utilized Ibn Khaldun’s thought in his writings and in his pursuit of empirical evidence. This paper explores how Abdurrahman ?eref discussed Ibn Khaldun’s historical methodology and periodization model in his two-volume history of the Ottoman State, Tarih-i Devlet-i Osmaniyye, the first volume of which was published in 1891 and the second in 1895. In Tarih-i Devlet-i Osmaniyye, which was a textbook designed to be taught in professional schools, especially the School of Civil Administration, Abdurrahman ?eref claims that he follows Ibn Khaldun’s methodology, which requires not only narration of historical events but also establishing a causal relationship among them. At first glance, Abdurrahman ?eref seems to be an “Ibn Khaldunist” as he also adapts Ibn Khaldun’s model of dynastic cycles in his periodization of Ottoman history. Yet I explain how Abdurrahman ?eref modifies Ibn Khaldun’s historical concepts into his own progressivist way of historical thinking. Ultimately, I argue that Abdurrahman ?eref’s history presents an exception to “Ibn Khaldunism” as he transforms Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical view of history into his own vision of the Ottoman Empire, which he regarded as an eternal state (devlet-i ebed-müddet) that would last until the end of the world due to the series of reforms initiated in the nineteenth century.
