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Ernest Gellner and Ibn
Khaldūn
By Michael Brett
School of Oriental and
African Studies, London
I
Over thirty years ago, in 1974, Ernest Gellner read a paper here
in Tunis to a conference marking the fortieth anniversary of the
founding of the Neo-Destour. Entitled ‘Cohesion and identity: the
Maghreb from Ibn Khaldun to Emile Durkheim’,
[1]
it sprang from a close intellectual involvement with North Africa
and Ibn Khaldūn, which led into his celebrated analysis of the
transformation of world society from the agrarian to the
industrial. Ten years after his death in 1996, it is appropriate to
review that involvement on the occasion of this second anniversary,
that of Ibn Khaldūn himself. A renowned sociologist, Ernest Gellner
was indebted to the Maghrib, in the first place for his experience
of fieldwork, and secondly for his interest in Islam – religion,
society and civilisation. His fieldwork in Morocco in the 1950s,
which resulted in 1969 in the publication of his Saints of the
Atlas,[2]
established his concern with social structure at the same time that
it involved consideration of the role of religion in society. His
findings on the structure of the society he had studied, and on the
role of religion in it, reproduced those of Evans-Pritchard in his
study of The Sanusi of Cyrenaica in 1950;[3]
so that where Evans-Pritchard had attributed to the marabouts of the
Sanūsiyya the function of dealing with the outside world, Gellner
described the role of his saints as intermediaries between their
followers and the state; they were the means to the integration of
these folk into a wider society. The wider society in this context
was that of French colonial Morocco; but Gellner’s fieldwork from
1954 to 1961 coincided more or less exactly with Moroccan
independence and the reign of Mohammed V, as well as with the
Algerian war. In these great events, the Ahansal of the Atlas could
not compare with the Sanūsiyya in the role ascribed to them by
Evans-Pritchard, that of agents in the transformation of the bedouin
of Cyrenaica from tribe into nation in the course of war with the
Italians. The role of religion in the Moroccan and Algerian
revolutions, and in the new structures that emerged, nevertheless
became one of his major preoccupations, going far beyond the
interest of Evans-Pritchard in the evolution of tribal society, to
enter into a general theory of modernisation in the world at large.
In an article first published in 1968, ‘A pendulum swing theory of
Islam’,[4]
he began by distinguishing between two types of religiosity in
Islam, the one scriptural and egalitarian, the other saintly and
hierarchical. The letters P and C which he assigned to these types
indicated their equivalence to Protestantism and Catholicism in
Western European Christianity, a comparison which provided the basis
for reflection on the contrast between the societies in question,
and contributed to an all-embracing distinction between two types of
society, pre-modern agrarian and modern industrial. The distinction
was developed in a major work, Plough, Sword and Book: the
structure of human history, published in 1988.[5]
The comparison was implicit in his Muslim Society,[6]
a collection of essays published in 1981 which began with a major
elaboration of the pendulum swing theory under the title, ‘Flux and
reflux in the faith of men’,[7]
continued with ‘Cohesion and identity’, and included a series of
review articles in which he stated his position if necessary against
that of the author.
Critical articles of this kind culminated in 1993 in a review of
Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, which generated a
heated exchange with Said in the pages of The Times Literary
Supplement.[8]
The argument was over the role of culture in what Gellner regarded
as the structural transformation of the world, but degenerated into
angry expressions of contempt for each other’s scholarship and
theories. It focussed in particular upon the role of two figures in
the struggle for Algerian independence, Frantz Fanon and Ben Badis.
For Said, Fanon’s description of the Algerian revolution as the
cultural response of the colonised illustrated the thesis of
Orientalism by demonstrating the centrality of cultural imperialism
to the conflict. For Gellner, Fanon played no part in its success;
it was Ben Badis whose establishment of a scholarly, Protestant form
of Islam at the heart of the Algerian resistance confirmed his own
view of this type of Islam in the modern world, that it served the
purpose of nationalism by uniting those uprooted by the progress of
industrial society in a sense of belonging to the wider communities
which that society had created. The point I wish to make in this
connection is not that either of them were right or wrong in this
matter of influence, but that each was using a historical example to
prove a general thesis, the one psychological, the other
sociological. It is this use of history that Gellner had in common
with Ibn Khaldūn, and enabled him to rely on the Muqaddimah
for his own purposes, even when their ends were not the same.
For
their ends were not the same. Amongst all the different
understandings of his project, I have been convinced by Abdesselam
Cheddadi that Ibn Khaldūn was indeed a historian, whose science of
civilisation, translated as his sociology, was intended to make
sense of the mass of historical information about the human race
which was available in the literature. Cheddadi himself disagrees,
following the common opinion that Ibn Khaldūn’s criterion of
possibility is a poor substitute for the investigation of ‘what
really happened’, a task which is fundamental to history as we think
of it today. Failing that, his Ibn Khaldūn becomes a sociologist,
devoted like Gellner to an understanding of the workings of human
society, but one whose principal object of concern has gone
unperceived by those who have mistaken it for the state. It is in
fact the nation, defined physically, by descent; then economically,
by territory and way of life; and finally politically, by government
and the pursuit of power. The pursuit of power gives rise to
dominant nations, whose achievement of empire reveals them as the
prime movers of civilisation in all its aspects.[9]
But granted that this is one way to look at the totality of the
Kitāb al-‘Ibar, it is equally possible, and perhaps more
plausible, to look at it the other way round, and to see the rise
and fall of nations as the organising principle of this immense
narrative of the doings of humanity, in other words of its history.[10]
It is certainly the case that the presence of such a narrative as
the sequel to the discussion of civilisation in the introduction to
the Kitāb al-‘Ibar differentiates Ibn Khaldūn’s magnum
opus from the work of Gellner, which is entirely sociological.
That is something to be borne in mind when considering the use of
historical examples that both of them make to support their
arguments, and the use which Gellner makes of Ibn Khaldūn as a
source of such examples and their significance.
II
That
use is at its simplest in ‘Cohesion and identity: the Maghreb from
Ibn Khaldun to Emile Durkheim’, where Ibn Khaldūn’s description of
the ‘asabiyya or solidarity characteristic of tribal society
is held to correspond to Durkheim’s definition of mechanical as
distinct from organic solidarity.[11]
Such solidarity is based on the similarity of individuals and the
units to which they belong within the society of which they are
members – a definition which happily fits the simple family-based
tribal societies described by Ibn Khaldūn and labelled segmentary by
Gellner’s school of social anthropology. Organic solidarity, on the
other hand, springs from complementarity, the way in which the
different parts played by the members of a more complex society
contribute to the operation of the whole. Such a definition would
equally happily fit the urban society described by Ibn Khaldūn, were
it not that for him, no such solidarity appears to exist in the
city. For Durkheim, on the other hand, organic solidarity is far
stronger than its mechanical equivalent, the solidarity of the tribe
– a contrast between the two authors that Gellner explains by the
contrast between their two worlds, the pre-modern and the modern,
the agrarian and the industrial. In that modern, industrial world,
he suggests, tribal society with its mechanical solidarity is a
thing of the past, while Durkheim’s organic solidarity has emerged
as nationalism.
The
waning of mechanical solidarity with the progressive elimination of
tribal society may be uncontroversial, but for Gellner as well as
for Durkheim the question of organic solidarity was bound up with
religion. For Durkheim there was no problem, since religion was the
active principle of such solidarity. The difficulty for Gellner was
that in the urban society described by Ibn Khaldūn, it appeared not
to be so. The problem was addressed in ‘Flux and reflux in the
faith of men’.[12]
Its title was taken from David Hume, the eighteenth-century
philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, who proposed that the
history of religion oscillated between polytheism and monotheism as
one god became the One and Only God, only to generate a set of
lesser but less remote deities to act as intermediaries between the
worshipper and this transcendent being, before the principle of a
single divinity reasserted itself. Hume’s primary example was the
replacement of Classical paganism by Christianity, followed by the
multiplication of saints in the Catholic Church and their subsequent
rejection by the Protestant Reformation; but he likewise referred to
the appearance of ‘holy dervishes’ in Islam. The reason he gave for
this flux and reflux was psychological, the working of the human
mind; but for Gellner, Hume’s thesis could be married with those of
the Muqaddimah to produce a model of Islam and its operation
in the world of Ibn Khaldūn. Ibn Khaldūn himself supplies such a
model only incidentally, when speaking of the offices of the
Caliphate, or partially, when describing Sufism and Mahdism.[13]
His description of urban and tribal society, however, allowed
Gellner, with his comparative approach to Islam as one among other
scriptural religions, to explain what he saw as a paradox, namely,
that this particular religion of the book, which claimed to govern
every aspect of human life on the basis of equality before the Law,
should have been so politically quiescent when the Law was flouted
by the state, in contrast to the activism of its Protestant
equivalent in Christianity. His answer lay in the identification of
scriptural Islam with the urban civilisation of the town, whose
inhabitants, like sheep, relied upon the ruler for protection from
the tribal wolves. Those wolves, on the other hand, who relied upon
themselves for defence, preferred the Islamic equivalent of
Catholicism for that very reason, calling upon the personal
authority of the saints for mediation in their disputes. Religion
in these circumstances became dynamic only when the swing of the
pendulum was set in motion by a prophet who took Hume’s monotheism
from the town to the tribe, and there came into play the principle
formulated by Ibn Khaldūn, that religion required ‘asabiyya
or esprit de corps just as ‘asabiyya required religion
to be socially and politically effective. On the strength of that
principle, the tribe would come in from the countryside to rule the
town.
With
or without Islam, of course, such dynamism is of the essence of the
argument of the Muqaddimah, which combines the two different
societies in a symbiotic relationship, economically and
politically. It is also the case that it is repetitive rather than
progressive, until what Gellner called ‘the coming of modernity’
radically changed the relationship by increasing the power of the
state at the expense of the tribes, and the urban population at the
expense of the rural. Saintly Islam in consequence became
redundant, while scriptural Islam was marginalised for legal and
administrative purposes. The pendulum was unhinged, while the flux
of belief continued in response to the pressures of adjustment to
the new world. The principal demand was for organic as distinct
from mechanical solidarity in the new nation states, for which
purpose scriptural Islam was politicised as a principle of
nationalism in competition or collaboration with other ideologies.
The actual combinations varied widely, but Gellner insisted that at
least within the Arid Zone (a term which he took from Marshall
Hodgson[14])
they all arose out of the kind of society described by Ibn Khaldūn,
and conformed to the logic of his model of traditional Muslim
civilisation. It only remained to counter the possible objections
to the scheme: that tribal society was not as rule-bound as the
segmentary theory of social anthropology would have it; that the
Mamluk and Ottoman empires were a major exception to the rule of
tribal dynasties; that there was no necessary connection between a
Protestant form of religion and urban trade, nor between tribesmen
and saints. Against all of these he argued as a stout structuralist
and functionalist who believed in the interpretative power of
modelling. Contending in conclusion that any model is better than
none for the understanding of human society, he put forward this
particular model with, and I quote, ‘the conviction that, all in
all, it does capture the way in which ecology, social organisation,
and ideology interlock in one highly distinctive civilisation; that
it explains how their distinctive fusion produced its
stabilities and tensions, and continues to influence the various
paths along which it is finally entering the modern world’.[15]
III
Historical as the model is, Gellner was not a historian, and his use
of historians was by his own admission secondary. Against him, it
would be possible to take the extreme historicist view of
contingency, and argue, perhaps with Laroui, that the data do not
lend themselves to such generalisations.[16]
It would be equally possible to take the sociological view that as
an outsider he had no understanding of the society from the inside,
but rather was seeing it in terms of his own preconceptions, the
criticism made by Said.[17]
To both of these he might have answered that for anyone, the past is
a foreign country, but one that in this case was inhabited by an
insider with the gift of objectivity, namely Ibn Khaldūn. For
Gellner, Ibn Khaldūn was, I quote, ‘a superb inductive sociologist,
a practitioner, long before the term was invented, of the method of
ideal types, [who offered] a brilliant account of one
extremely important kind of society’.[18]
To see Ibn Khaldūn in this way, in Gellner’s own image, is of course
to invite the criticism of all those who disagree with this
evaluation of his major source. But the questions which his reading
of Ibn Khaldūn was designed to answer are not to be avoided in this
way, all the more because they extend beyond the evolution of the
society described by Ibn Khaldūn to that of the modern world as a
whole. Reviewers have agreed. Commenting on Muslim Society
in The Times Literary Supplement, Jacques Berque concluded
that:
‘the
vast subject-matter and the staggering synthesis implied in
Gellner’s title would be hard of attainment, and it would be easier
to cavil at this book than attempt the task oneself. The vast
amount of information it contains, together with the questions which
it successfully raises, make this in any case the kind of exposé
that can be read with genuine intellectual pleasure. Whatever the
debate it may provoke among specialists, it has enriched the way in
which we look at the Muslim world.’[19]
Of
the still wider scope of Plough, Sword and Book, Eugen Weber
said much the same thing, once again in The Times Literary
Supplement, but with a difference:
‘That is where the author leaves us, with not many answers, but with
lots of questions, and a lot more ideas, probably, than we had
before opening his book. It is a contentious book, an
unsatisfactory book, a fascinating book. To paraphrase Gellner, the
past lives twice: once in itself, a second time in our
reconstruction of it. The past, of course, is a multiple of our
fantasies. As reconstructed by Gellner, it may not be the past that
was; nor, sometimes, the past that historians are liable to
reconstruct. But, chock-full of wit and argumentative passion, it
testifies to the zest and stimulation to be derived from
contemplating what once might have been.’[20]
There
speaks the historian as distinct from the sociologist, aware of the
epistemological gap between past events and present knowledge, the
diversity of interpretation it engenders, the intellectual
excitement and controversy that is the consequence. As a historian
I have to agree, and add that as a result, the history of the
subject is the subject. The model that Gellner has
constructed of Muslim society on the basis of Ibn Khaldūn is a
contribution to the history of that society, to what we think we
know about it, as the exchange with Said makes clear. What is more
striking is that, in constructing his still more ambitious model of
the replacement of agrarian by industrial society, he has followed
Ibn Khaldūn the historian in the attempt to make sociological sense
of the history of the world. And while Gellner, with the knowledge
of what, economically, socially and scientifically, was still in the
fourteenth century to come, may have the advantage over Ibn Khaldūn,
he arrives in the end at the same political conclusion. Eugen Weber
puts his finger on it:
‘Yet,
as Gellner points out, the scientific revolution barely extends to
the human field. The explanations and effectiveness…associated with
natural science scarcely extend to the study of man… Nor, having
gone a long way to solving the problems of cognition and production,
are we much further advanced when it comes to the political problems
related to instilling cultural concepts, making and enforcing
decisions. Political order will not wither away. Anyway, it is
needed to enforce decisions crucial to the economic infrastructure
of an increasingly centralised world, and to social cohesion as
well… We are back, it seems, at the question of power.’[21]
The
pertinence of that analysis will not be lost today.
[1]
Cahiers du C.E.R.E.S., Tunis,
1974; reprinted in Government and Opposition, 10 (1975),
203-18, and in E. Gellner, Muslim Society, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1981, 86-98.
[2]
E. Gellner, Saints of the Atlas,
Weidenfeld and Nocolson, London, 1969.
[3]
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of
Cyrenaica,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1949.
[4]
E. Gellner, ‘A pendulum swing theory
of Islam’, Annales de Sociologie Marocaines (1968), 5-14.
[5]
E. Gellner, Plough, Sword and
Book: the structure of human history, Collins Harvill, 1988.
[7]
Gellner, Muslim Society, 1-85.
[8]
The Times Literary Supplement,
19 February 1993, 3-4; 19 March 1993, 15; 2 April 1993, 17; 9
April 1993, 15; 4 June 1993,17; 11 June 1993, 17.
[9]
A. Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldûn. Peuples
et nations du monde, 2 vols., Sindbad, Paris, 1986.
[10]
Cf. M. Brett, ‘The way of the nomad’,
Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, 58 (1995),
251-69, and in idem, Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib,
Variorum Series, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1996, no.X.
[13]
Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah. An
Introduction to History, trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols., 2nd
ed., Bollingen Foundation, New York, 1967; Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London and Henley, 1986, II, ch.3, 1-73, 156-200; III,
chVI, 76-103.
[14]
M.G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of
Islam, 3 vols., U. of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,
1974.
[15]
Gellner, Muslim Society, 85.
[16]
A. Laroui, L’Histoire du Maghreb,
François Maspéro, Paris, 1970.
[18]
Gellner, Muslim Society, 88-9.
[19]
The Times Literary Supplement,
11 December 1981, 1433.
[20]
Ibid., 29 October - 3 November 1988,
1191-2.
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