Ibn Khaldūn

He was seventeen when the plague swept through Tunis and took from him almost everything he knew. In the years 1348 and 1349 his parents and several of his teachers died of the Black Death. Whoever learns so early how quickly certainties collapse is often left with a single question for the rest of his life: what, of all that we hold to be true, really withstands examination, and what is merely habit passing itself off as truth?

Ibn Khaldūn, born in 1332 in Tunis into a family of Andalusian origin, received the classical scholarly education of his time: Qurʾān, Ḥadīth, Fiqh of the Mālikī school, Arabic philology. After that his life led him across the Islamic world, as secretary and minister at the courts of Fez, Granada and Tunis, then six times as chief Mālikī judge, qāḍī al-quḍāt, in Cairo, appointed by Sultan Barqūq. In 1401 he had himself lowered on ropes over the city wall of Damascus in order to negotiate with the conqueror Timur, one of the most memorable diplomatic encounters of the Middle Ages.

His real work, however, came into being in four years of withdrawal. In 1375 he retreated to the fortress of Qalʿat Ibn Salāma near Frenda in order to write the introduction to his world history, the Muqaddima. Its core is a single, radical question: by what does one recognize whether a historical report is true? For this Ibn Khaldūn developed a method of examination that judges a report not by the standing of its narrator, but by whether it fits the nature of things, the logic of society and rule. He thereby transferred the rigor that the Ḥadīth scholars had long applied to the transmission from the Prophet ﷺ, the examination of chain and content, to secular history. He regarded the science of Ḥadīth with great respect, he extended its method, he did not replace it. The historian Arnold Toynbee later called the Muqaddima the greatest work of its kind ever created by any human mind at any time in any place.

Medicine, in all this, was for Ibn Khaldūn far more than the one sentence for which he is sometimes quoted today. In the Muqaddima he devotes a chapter of its own to the healing art among the sciences. He defines it as the craft that examines the human body in sickness and in health in order to preserve health and cure illness by means of medicament and diet, and he describes its instruments one by one: the taking of the pulse, the constitution of the patient, the examination of the urine, ophthalmology, the function of the organs. As the founder of this discipline he names Galen, whose writings became its foundation, and in whose line he places ar-Rāzī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Majūsī and the Andalusian Ibn Zuhr. And he assigns the healing art its place within his own theory of civilization: it is an art of settled, urban culture, which draws its illnesses from prosperity and abundance. Bedouin life, by contrast, largely manages without it, with its simple, hard way of living, and relies on the transmitted experiential knowledge of the ancients, which he calls tajriba qāṣira, a limited experience not founded on the principles of nature.

Ibn Khaldūn then applied precisely this method of examination to a more delicate question as well: which statements of the Prophet ﷺ belong to the binding law, and which merely reflect the knowledge and the customs of the Arabia of his time? On the medicine that is mentioned in the transmitted reports he writes unmistakably: “The medicine mentioned in the transmitted reports is of the Bedouin type. It is in no way part of the divine revelation.” And further: the Prophet ﷺ was sent to teach the religious law, not medicine or other worldly matters. As evidence he draws on a Ḥadīth that Imam Muslim himself places under exactly this heading: when the Prophet ﷺ advised farmers against the artificial pollination of their date palms, the harvest failed, and he said that they knew the affairs of their world better than he did.

It is therefore not a distinction that Ibn Khaldūn brings to the Sunna from outside; it already stands in the Ḥadīth work itself, under a chapter title that almost word for word anticipates his own formula: the duty to follow the Prophet ﷺ in matters of religion, but not in what he says about the affairs of worldly life. Even the remedies named in the Qurʾān he does not flatly reject. Their effect on the sick person he explains also through the certainty and the trust of the believer, not through a natural property of the substance alone.

One should not mistake this sentence for distance from the Prophet ﷺ. Ibn Khaldūn was himself a judge who passed judgment by the Sharia every day, a man who held the science of Ḥadīth in honor, and evidently one who had occupied himself intensively with the healing art as a science. His point is narrower and at the same time bolder: not everything that has been transmitted is law. Some of it is the best available knowledge of one place and one time, valuable but not binding, and no one sins when a better medicine is found. Precisely this sharpness of distinction keeps the core of the faith pure and at the same time leaves the healing art the room to develop further.