The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

Content Warning: Ibn Khaldun uses offensive racial stereotypes in this section.

Humans are political animals. God created humanity with the need for food, but one person cannot carry out all the tasks necessary to obtain food, prepare it, and fashion the necessary tools. Additionally, humans lack the claws and strength other animals have for defense. Thus, God made cooperation in fighting and in preparing tools necessities for people to protect themselves. People naturally then require social organization—the topic of the author’s new science.

Social organization presupposes a political authority to direct it. This direction uses reason, unlike animals’ reliance on instinct. While divine revelation can guide society well, civilization can exist without it, as the existence of non-Muslim states clearly demonstrates.

Drawing on ancient Greeks like Ptolemy and more recent Muslim geographers, Ibn Khaldun describes the basic geography of the world. The “Surrounding Sea” covers half of our spherical world (the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in modern terminology, with the unknown North and South American continents assumed to be covered by the sea as well). It is natural to think of this western half of the world as “below” the eastern half, but that is technically wrong since gravity pulls everything to the center of the Earth.