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BIOGRAPHY Ibn Khaldun, by Syed Farid Alatas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 160 pages. $21.95 paper.
Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology, by Syed Farid Alatas. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 207 pages. $143.
Reviewed by Bruce B. Lawrence
Many authors have written about Ibn Khaldun, but no one, to my knowledge, has written two books about him that encompass both biography and sociology. Syed Farid Alatas, who teaches at National University of Singapore where he also chairs the Department of Malay Studies, is already well known for his several articles, essays, and interventions on Ibn Khaldun. Now he has published a fresh biography of the Maghribi polymath as well as an extensive review of his legacy as a sociologist. Both books are exceptional for their scope and clarity, marking a new register in Islamic intellectual history.
The first book, published in the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies series, "Makers of Islamic Civilization," provides the familiar three-stage sequence of Ibn Khaldun's life. It is reiterated from his own autobiography: his youth and training (20 years) is followed by his political and family life (23 years), which then culminates in his judicial and scholarly pursuits (31 years). The last is marred by the loss of his family in a tragic shipwreck and crowned by his meeting with Tamerlane near Damascus in 1401. More than a mere recapitulation of Ibn Khaldun's life and work, Alatas' profile probes the sources of Ibn Khaldun's distinctive approach to society. He examines why this Maghribi jurist founded a new science, with its principal focus neither rhetoric nor politics but human organization or human society. Its frame exceeded Islam and Muslim...