Javad Tabatabai’s Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences, for those who are familiar with Tabatabai, or Ibn Khaldun, or both, is a treasure for the entire Anglophone world of social sciences. Written around the time of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and first published in 1995, this work is particularly compelling in how it challenges conventional approaches to studying Islam and the Middle East by examining the epistemic and political-theological conditions that shaped modern debates about self and society in the region.Classical Arab scholarship, as I discuss elsewhere (Sehlikoglu, “Genealogy”), is not disconnected from Western scholarship. By classical Arab scholarship (CAS), I refer to the substantial body of works written in Arabic and circulated across North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of East Asia from roughly the late 900s to early 1400s. This intellectual tradition forms part of both ancient Greek heritage and contemporary Western scholarship. Therefore, revisiting classical Arabic texts requires not merely applying “fresh” perspectives, but assertively reclaiming their epistemic authority and dragging them from the margins into the core of contemporary social thought, treating them as generative theoretical resources rather than mere objects of historical study. Tabatabai’s work represents a significant contribution to this reclamation project by demonstrating how classical Arab texts like Ibn Khaldun’s can be engaged with as living intellectual resources rather than historical relics. Unlike approaches that either uncritically venerate tradition or dismiss it as irrelevant to modern concerns, Tabatabai’s critical engagement with Ibn Khaldun’s epistemological frameworks offers a model for how Arab scholarship can address contemporary theoretical questions. His approach is particularly valuable because it neither isolates CAS intellectual traditions from broader philosophical currents nor subordinates them to Western paradigms. Instead, he shows how Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the gap between (what Tabatabai calls) “traditional” and “modern” sciences provides conceptual tools for addressing current challenges in developing social sciences in the Middle East and beyond. By analyzing how this classical thinker attempted (and partially failed) to establish an epistemological break from inherited tradition, Tabatabai opens space for genuine intellectual dialogue across traditions while respecting their specificity. This positions his work as an exemplar of how reclaiming classical texts can generate theoretical frameworks that transcend both colonial impositions and reactionary rejections of modernity.In this vein, I read Tabatabai’s work as a forceful intervention into the genealogies of knowledge production and a product of intellectual care within broader decolonial efforts. To deepen this analysis, I bring forward another parallel intervention: the French-Kurdish sociologist Hamit Bozarslan’s Le luxe et la violence: Domination et contestation chez Ibn Khaldûn (2014), which offers complementary insights into how CAS can be reclaimed for contemporary theoretical understanding. Both scholars effectively challenge the contemporary appropriation of Ibn Khaldun by various ideological movements, particularly the Islamist intelligentsia. Where Tabatabai focuses on the epistemological gap between traditional and modern sciences in Ibn Khaldun’s work, I observe how Bozarslan concentrates on Ibn Khaldun’s theorization of state power and violence. These works together demonstrate the richness and complexity of Ibn Khaldun’s thought beyond simplistic ideological appropriations.These appropriations merit unpacking for readers unfamiliar with contemporary Middle Eastern intellectual politics. Since the mid-twentieth century, Ibn Khaldun has been enlisted in various nationalist and Islamist projects throughout the region. In Turkey, for instance, neo-Ottomanist intellectuals associated with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) have appropriated Ibn Khaldun to construct a romanticized view of Islamic governance that allegedly offers an alternative to Western political systems. Similarly, in postrevolutionary Iran, certain Islamist thinkers have selectively drawn from Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiyya (group solidarity) to justify contemporary forms of religious nationalism while ignoring his complex analysis of state formation and decline. These appropriations typically strip Ibn Khaldun’s thought of its historical specificity and analytical rigor, transforming him into a symbol of “authentic” Islamic intellectual tradition untainted by Western influence.What makes these romantic or populist appropriations particularly problematic is their embeddedness in postcolonial nationalist politics. They emerge from legitimate concerns about cultural imperialism but often replicate colonial epistemologies in reverse. By positioning Ibn Khaldun as representing an essentialized “Islamic” approach to social science that stands in opposition to “Western” thought, they ironically reinforce the very East-West binary established by Orientalist scholarship. This binary thinking serves contemporary political projects that seek religious legitimation for authoritarian governance while claiming to resist Western hegemony.Bozarslan’s analysis of Ibn Khaldun’s concept of power (le pouvoir; mulk in Ibn Khaldun’s original Arabic text) is particularly significant in this context. His interpretation of Khaldunian mulk as a general concept designating the exercise of authority through constraint and domination provides an important counterpoint to contemporary Islamist claims that theories of power are absent from CAS and inevitably from the classical Islamic thought of the very same period (22). While this definition differs substantially from Foucauldian conceptualizations of power, it demonstrates the sophisticated understanding of political authority in classical Islamic thought. His Franco-Kurdish background informs this critical perspective on both Western Orientalism and Islamist appropriations of tradition. By highlighting Ibn Khaldun’s sophisticated understanding of how luxury and violence intertwine in state formation, Bozarslan offers conceptual tools that transcend simplistic binaries of “Islamic” versus “Western” political theory.This analysis complements Tabatabai’s broader argument about the need to understand Islamic intellectual traditions on their own terms, rather than through either colonial or reactionary nationalist lenses. Tabatabai, writing in the context of postrevolutionary Iran, confronts similar intellectual currents that seek to appropriate traditional Islamic thought for contemporary political projects while rejecting modern critical tools that might expose the power dynamics within those very projects. Together, they provide conceptual tools that can help expose the power dynamics obscured by romantic Islamist narratives about traditional governance. This is particularly relevant for countries like Turkey and Iran, where various forms of Islamist politics have evolved from opposition movements into state ideologies that justify new forms of domination.The project of “decolonizing Islam” requires further elaboration here, as it has taken multiple forms in contemporary scholarship. In Euro-American academia, decolonizing approaches to Islamic studies have emerged primarily in response to the field’s Orientalist foundations. Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism (1978) exposed how the academic study of Islam had been intimately connected to European colonial projects, leading to methodological innovations that sought to break from these problematic foundations. This decolonizing impulse has evolved in several directions over the past four decades.One prominent strand, most associated with Talal Asad and those influenced by his work, approaches Islam as a discursive tradition with its own internal logics and rationalities. This approach seeks to understand Islamic practice and thought without reducing it to Western categories and has been tremendously generative in challenging Orientalist assumptions. However, this approach, with its emphasis on Islam as a potential source of critique of secular modernity, sometimes risks romanticizing “tradition” in ways that can be politically ambiguous. While profoundly valuable in challenging Eurocentric assumptions, this strand of decolonization often lacks the tools to critically analyze how postcolonial Islamist movements themselves reproduce colonial epistemologies in their rejection of “the West.”Decolonizing Islam must also contend with the reality that anti-Western Islamist discourses are themselves products of colonialism. I find particularly compelling the observation made by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi that Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (from Asadabad, 1838) was likely the first to introduce the idea of Islam as an antithesis to the West and its ideology. This historical insight leads me to view many contemporary anti-Western Islamic movements as children of colonialism—products of a political project that positions Islam as the cultural opposite of the West and what is characterized as Western ideology. What we often see as reverse colonialism remains trapped within colonial conceptual vocabularies. This dynamic is particularly evident in Turkey, where the AKP government’s neo-Ottomanist ideology simultaneously rejects “Western values” while embracing neoliberal economic policies and modernist state structures.Together, Tabatabai and Bozarslan suggest several promising pathways for developing more nuanced approaches to decolonization. First, they demonstrate the value of engaging with precolonial Islamic intellectual traditions not as static repositories of timeless wisdom but as dynamic resources that contain both insights and limitations for addressing contemporary challenges. This approach avoids both the Orientalist dismissal of Islamic thought and the nativist glorification of tradition. Second, their work suggests the importance of transcending the binary logic that positions “Islam” and “the West” as monolithic, opposing entities. By showing how Ibn Khaldun’s thought cannot be reduced to either category, they point toward intellectual frameworks that recognize the complex interconnections and mutual influences between different traditions without erasing their specificity. Third, both scholars exemplify a form of critical engagement with tradition that is neither dismissively secularist nor uncritically traditionalist. They show how one can value traditional Islamic scholarship while simultaneously subjecting it to rigorous critical analysis, including analysis of its limitations and internal tensions.In my reading, the convergence of these two scholarly works reveals the continuing relevance of Ibn Khaldun’s thought for understanding both historical and contemporary political dynamics. While I see Tabatabai examining the epistemological conditions that make modern social scientific knowledge possible or impossible in Islamic contexts, I appreciate how Bozarslan illuminates Ibn Khaldun’s insights into the relationship between state power, violence, and social order. This context makes Tabatabai’s work especially significant, as it offers tools for moving beyond both colonial and reactive anti-colonial frameworks. Their work helps us imagine ways to decolonize Islamic thought without falling into the trap of either uncritically accepting Western frameworks or reactively rejecting them in ways that paradoxically reinforce colonial epistemologies.This approach also has crucial political implications: by grounding critique of, for instance, contemporary far-right Islamic politics in the critical resources found within CAS itself, scholars can offer analyses that resonate with followers of populist Islamic movements rather than being dismissed as externally imposed Western criticism. Such an approach aligns with developing theories of political imagination through heuristic concepts like takhayyul (terrestrial imagination that encompasses sensible, imaginable, and intelligible dimensions), which offer triadic alternatives to dualistic relations with reality and exemplify how decolonial scholarship can produce autonomous theoretical contributions beyond reactive critiques of Western thought (Sehlikoglu, “Imaginative”).Given this background, Tabatabai’s scholarship becomes particularly important, as it represents what we need more of in decolonial scholarship today: not merely a critique of Eurocentric frameworks, but forceful theoretical and epistemological knowledge production. Such knowledge production, with an ability to go beyond repeating existing critiques and offering new ways of thinking with heuristic tools, requires much greater intellectual potency; yet its transformative capacity is undeniable. This is precisely what scholars invested in decolonizing Islamic thought should prioritize: taking a more active role in producing new theories that emerge from within Islamic intellectual traditions themselves, offering conceptual tools that transcend colonial binaries and speak to contemporary political realities.This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council grant number 853230.
Sertaç Sehlikoglu (Wed,) studied this question.
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