Page 15 - Issue 39

ELITE Vol.1, Issue 39, January 2022
Vol.1, Issue 39, January

Ibn Khaldun and the Future of

Political Science
Dr. Mohamed Soffar, Professor of Political Science

Translated by: Salma Tageldin
According to German-American Political Scientist Eric savior hero who is not only surrounded by the heavens' grace
Voegelin, “The establishment of government is essentially an and protection but whose steps are also guided by it.
essay on the creation of the world." Given that his decisions are hereby technically issued by a
By this, he means that the cosmion, derived from the cosmos as supreme wisdom reflecting divine will, then the patriarchal
in the universe, is a small system arising from the midst of an authority of the head of the family becomes legitimate and his
enormous frenzy of conflicting human desires, all whilst under procedures enjoy acceptance by the other family members.
the pressure of destructive forces whether from the inside or the This is because they see such procedures as embodying in
outside. The function of this system is to provide man with a their contents the directing or guiding idea of the savior hero.
safe haven that protects him from the threat of such hostile Therefore, if we assume that one of the family's sons decided
forces and under which he could give his life some sort of to take hold of the reigns of things and took control by
meaning. winning a vote that the family had set up within themselves,
Since the cosmion, or that small system, as a world of meaning, then his authority would still not be deemed legitimate by any
is merely similar to the universe, then it is imaginary by nature. of the family members despite its soundness in terms of
This imagined nature is liable to discovery by individuals and legality. This is because the voting and the legal
when it is discovered, the structure of the system immediately representation of the family, as guiding ideas for this
collapses. institution, are of no value in the eyes of the same family's
That is why the actual use of violence or simply the threat of its other children. Plus, the son's authority and practices inside
possible usage is a determining tool to build the cosmos and the family do not existentially represent the legend of the
preserving it, whether in the face of internal outlaws or external savior hero.
invaders. The study of authority in the Islamic civilization, I believe, is
The system of meanings or the cosmion is compromised of a distributed among at least four traditions. The first is Islamic
group of an interconnected set of political ideas. A political idea jurisprudence or that of legal Islamic jurists, which is
is not one that acts as a tool to describe political reality but rather essentially their own judgements and abilities to come up with
to create it; that is the constructive or structural function of rules or policies for issues related to the ruler and the ruled
language. that had not been mentioned in any legal text. The second is
These ideas build or create political reality when they act as civic politics or political philosophy, which is attempts by
guiding ideas to the structure, function and practices of the Islamic philosophers to employ the theoretical frameworks of
ruling or governing institutions; thus the ruler's authority the Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, for the
becomes legitimate in the eyes of his subjects when said sake of studying political cases that are connected to the
authority bears the representative characteristic of the main ideas reality and problems of Muslims in that age.
guiding the work of the institutions of governance. The third is Sultanistic literature or the politics of books,
Suppose, for example, that a certain family has its cultural which is based on the writings put forward by writers for the
heritage determined by a popular legend about the one and only sake of advising their rulers on the best ways of consolidating

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