Reading and interpreting Ibn Khaldun's economic philosophy

Abstract

This work aims to present key concepts, ideas, and events that can be derived mainly from Ibn Khaldun’s chapter on economic life, which he captures with the heading, Chapter on Making a Living (ma`āsh). Justifying this undertaking is the significance of Ibn Khaldun’s contributions, the scarcity of translations of his work, and the dependency of secondary interpretive works on a single English translation. While a reading of Ibn Khaldun’s economic philosophy through a textual analysis of the primary sources remains the focus of this work, a sampling of the interpretive and translation works is also presented here in order to understand the level of engagement of non-Arabic scholars with Ibn Khaldun’s work and as a frame of mind with which economic philosophers and social historians might engage.

Keywords: theories of work, systems thinking, urbanization, civilization, Islamic social history

JEL Classification: B1