Ibn Khaldun and Critical Inquiry: A Response to Christian Fuchs

Re-Readings: Khaldun in His Time and Ours

Introducing Khaldun’s economic thought Joseph Spengler has argued that what he has to say

is important not so much because . . . he came in time to be looked upon as one who had anticipated a variety of “modern” notions. It is important rather because had a deep insight into. . . the culture of his day. (Spengler, 1964: 269)

This suggests two contrasted approaches to re-reading Khaldun under present conditions. The first closes the gap between his time and ours, demonstrating that he anticipated key concepts which remain relevant and central to contemporary analysis. This is the approach Christian Fuchs takes in the present issue as he teases out the continuities between Khaldun and Marx and applies them to communication under digital capitalism.

Khaldun has been nominated variously as the founder of sociology, a pioneering economist and the first modern historian. Christian Fuchs introduces him to readers in critical theory and communication studies who might not otherwise be aware of him and his importance in the history of social thought.

He sets out to claim Khaldun for critical political economy and demonstrate his relevance to the critical analysis of communication. Khaldun certainly meets the basic criteria that distinguish work in political economy from economics as it has come to be institutionalised in the modern academy. He refuses to define ‘the economy’ as a bounded domain and insists on locating economic relations within a general analysis of social formations. He pays particular attention to the interplay between markets and states, private enterprise, and collective life, and most importantly of all, he grounds his evaluations in moral philosophy and questions of justice.

Fuchs’ reading is rich, provocative and welcome but I have two reservations. First, as he explains, his exposition is based on searching for passages in Khaldun’s best known work, the Muqaddimah, directly relevant ‘for understanding communication in capitalism and class societies and ideology’.

This selective reading succeeds in locating quotations that anticipate Marx but overlooks material that positions Khaldun as a precursor of the alternative, liberal tradition developed by Adam Smith and other classical political economists and revived in contemporary neo-liberalism. Reading him requires us to engage with this tension.

The second reservation has to do with the elision of context, Fuchs tells us comparatively little about Khaldun’s life and times and the experiences and forces shaping his thought, but reading Khaldun’s writings it is immediately clear that they are indelibly marked by the political turbulence he lived though, the diverse social and economic structures he encountered as a high-ranking administrator, and the systems of law, anchored in Islamic ethical practice, deployed to manage abuses and ensure justice.

Acknowledging these contexts require us to pursue Spengler’s second mode of reading, restoring Khaldun to his time and place and identifying areas of inquiry that may otherwise be marginalised.

Deciding how to read Khaldun also raises more general questions around de-westernising the academy in the Global North. I will return to these later, but I want to begin with an instructive tale of an unexpected affinity between Khaldun and a leading figure in developing digital capitalism.

Bedouins and ‘Geeks’: Ibn Khaldun in Silicon Valley

At the beginning of 2015, Mark Zuckerberg launched A Year of Books. Every fortnight, he would introduce an ‘important’ book he was reading and invite followers on his nascent Facebook site to discuss it. In June, he announced that his latest selection was Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, written in 1377 AD as a book length introduction or prolegomenon to his seven volume regional history, the Kitab al-Iba, the Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the History of the Arabs and Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries. At first sight, it appears an eccentric choice. Why would an ambitious young computer ‘geek’ and entrepreneur, working at the cutting edge of digital capitalism, be interested in the thoughts of a 14th-century Islamic philosopher and former high-ranking civil servant?

One obvious reason is that the Muqaddimah is now seen as a ‘must read’ for anyone seriously interested in the origins of social analysis. There are good reasons for this. It was unprecedented in its comprehensiveness, drawing on, developing, and synthesising insights from a huge range of sources. Khaldun was a devout Muslim but rejected all explanations that admitted divine intervention or predestination insisting that events were always and everywhere the result of human action. He acknowledged the role of ideas, particularly religious beliefs, in directing action but developed a thoroughly materialist analysis that located the roots of social and cultural organisation in economic systems and interactions with the environment. His theory was dialectical. Present conditions contained the seeds of their own destruction and replacement. But arguably his most radical intervention was in his methods of inquiry. He insisted that explanations must ruthlessly interrogate received wisdoms and ideological smoke screens, and be based solely on evidence derived from first-hand observation and critical reading of available documents. His aim was to lay the basis for a distinctive, and distinctively new, science of society. As he notes,

If I have succeeded in presenting the problems of this science exhaustively and in showing how it differs in its various aspects and characteristics from all other crafts. . . the merit is mine since I cleared and marked the way. (Khaldun, 1967: 42)

Acknowledging his formative contribution to sociology and the social sciences is relatively recent in the Global North, however. Until a printed edition of the Muqaddimah was finally issued in Cairo in 1857, readers relied on handwritten copies. These were relatively plentiful but inaccessible to anyone unable to read Arabic. English readers had to wait for Franz Rosenthal’s 1958 translation. In the meantime, European scholars fell back on the French translation issued in 1863 as part of a general attempt to better understand the Berbers following the capture of Algiers in 1830 and the subjugation of Algeria as a French colony from 1848 onwards.

Khaldun came from an influential family whose elite status required him to train for high office by mastering a classical Islamic education under a succession of distinguished scholars. He memorised the Holy Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings (Ahadith) and studied Arabic literature, philosophy, mathematics, and Islamic jurisprudence. His intellectual formation also owed much to what has come to be known as the ‘translation movement’. This saw key works by Aristotle, Plato and other classical Greek authors salvaged from oblivion and the domination of Latin in Christian Europe and translated into Arabic by teams working under the auspices of Muslim rulers.

The main centre of translation was Baghdad. With a population of over a million the world’s largest ninth-century city and home to the House of Wisdom, a library and research centre founded ‘with the express aim of gathering the world’s knowledge to be studied by the greatest scholars, translators and scientists’ (Mac Sweeney, 2023). Muslim, Christian, and Jewish experts worked alongside each other. Handwritten copies of translated texts circulated widely across the Islamic world.

As a result, Khaldun was heir to the same philosophical roots in ‘Aristotelian logic and Greek environmental determinism’ as the founding figures in Western sociology, which helps to explain why his work continues to strike chords (Dale, 2006: 446). Until recently however, this communality has gone largely unnoticed.

The lack of interest in translating and disseminating Islamic social scholarship in leading Western intellectual centres, combined with a dominant focus on capitalist modernity and its contradictions, colluded with a latent Orientalism to position Khaldun as a historical exception rather than an integral contributor to the development of a distinctive sociological imagination.

Introducing the Muqaddimah on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg notes that despite the huge transformations in commerce and politics since Khaldun’s death, “the overall worldview” is “still very interesting when it’s all considered together” particularly in its focus “on how society and culture flow” (Zuckerberg, 2015). The emphasis on “flow” and transformation is central.

In mid-career, between 1375 and 1378, Khaldun withdrew from politics and administration and retreated to a castle in the province of Oran to read and reflect on his experiences. It was during this sabbatical that he developed the core ideas of the Muqaddimah.

He starts from the observation that ‘The condition of the world and of nations, their customs and sects, does not persist in the same form or in a constant manner’ (Khaldun, 1967: 25). Western thinkers, including Marx, work with linear conceptions, imaging time as an arrow pointing forwards and ever upwards, Khaldun’s experience of dynastic turbulence in the North Africa of his time led him to emphasise cyclical recurrence. His analysis is directed to explaining the rise and fall of successive regional dynasties. It is not intended as a general model of historical change.

The Muquaddimah can be read as his attempt to locate his biography within a wider history. After completing his education, he entered state administration. Aged 20, he secured a post at the court of Tunis. Three years later, he became secretary to the Sultan of Morocco in Fez and subsequently occupied a series of important administrative positions. But as his biographer Robert Irvin notes, he also spent a great deal of time ‘in the desert on official missions, tax collecting or recruiting troops’ and his work is coloured by a ‘huge nostalgia for when things were simpler’ (quoted in Rahim, 2018). His admiration for the austere lifestyle and strong bonds of desert peoples jostled with his ambivalent relation to cities as simultaneously hubs of commerce, culture and learning and centres of possessive individualism, corruption, and excess.

His analysis is also strongly marked by a permanent sense of precarity. Originally from Hadhramaut in present-day Yemen, his family migrated to al-Andalus, the Muslim territory covering much of what is now Spain, where family members held a succession of important administrative and political positions in the Andalusian government. In 1248, following the capture of Seville by Ferdinand III of Castille, a crucial advance in the Catholic ‘reconquest’ of Spain, the family moved to Tunis. In 1258, Mongols commanded by Kublai Khan’s grandson, Hulagu Khan, sacked and pillaged Baghdad. Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332 into a political culture haunted by the impermanence of seemingly stable institutions and the inevitability of decline. His own awareness of precarity and sudden reversals was reinforced by personal experience. He was imprisoned, suspected of supporting a rebellion, his brother was murdered, and his closest friend Ibn al-Khatib executed.

He sees the harsh but egalitarian conditions imposed by mutual dependence and continual armed skirmishes with other groups forging iron strong social bonds and esprit de corps, asabiyyah, among desert peoples, making them a formidable fighting force able to conquer and occupy cities and replace the former rulers. Over time, however, managing a complex urban economy organised around commerce and crafts opens social divisions among the new arrivals. Increased taxes to pay for the hired military force needed for defence widens the gap between rulers and ruled. Austere living is replaced by a taste for luxury and indulgence, leaving the dynasty weakened and vulnerable to conquest by a new group of insurgents coming out of the desert.

As Morteza Hasemi has argued, this dominant narrative, of highly organised and motivated outsiders displacing complacent incumbents, offers a perfect metaphor for the victory of Facebook, and the other Silicon Valley ‘geeks’, over the established media corporations in the struggle to command the key platforms of digital capitalism (Hashemi, 2019: 536). When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook as an open public space in September 2006, social media provision was dominated by MySpace which Rupert Murdoch’s global media corporation, News Corp, had acquired 2 months before. Five years later, after a series of miscalculations and missed opportunities, News Corp was forced to offload MySpace at a massive loss, leaving Facebook as the dominant player in the sector.

Zuckerberg has never said if he recognises this parallel but his early exhortation to Facebook staff to ‘move fast and break things’ might easily have been inscribed on the banners of nomadic insurgents as they approached the city walls.

Christian Fuchs’ contribution to the current issue of this journal proposes more substantive continuities between central arguments in Khaldun’s work and the core tasks facing the critical analysis of communication under digital capitalism.

Caravans, Commerce and Capitalism

As he rightly argues, the spectacular rise and huge reach of Amazon requires us to look again at the role of commerce in the organisation of capitalism.

Merchant capitalism has occupied an uneasy relation with Marxism’s insistence on prioritising the analysis of production. Christian Fuchs deploys Khaldun to argue for its continuing centrality to the organisation of digital capitalism.

Khaldun lived and worked at the centre of one of the greatest trading empires the world has seen. From the outset, Islam fostered a merchant economy. Before becoming a prophet, Muhammad was a caravan trader. He met the wealthy woman who became his wife when she agreed to invest in one of his ventures. The Qur’an actively encourages fair and consensual exchange, as in this passage: ‘O ye who believe! Eat not up your property among yourselves in vanities. But let there be among you, traffic and trade by mutual consent’ (quoted in Shamsunahar, 2021). The caravans that crossed the Sahara could be enormous averaging around a thousand camels with Khaldun claiming that some included as many as 12,000 (Shamsunahar op cit) As Benedikt Koehler has argued, the models offered by the commercial and legal systems that governed Islamic trade, as it fanned out across the land and seas routes of Mediaeval Europe and beyond, were more central to the development of European capitalism than the practices later developed in the Renaissance Italian city states conventionally cited in Western historiographies (Koehler, 2014)

Writing Capital in exile in London, the centre of the self-styled ‘workshop of the world’, Marx sees capitalism being reorganised around control over industrialised extraction and manufacture. At key points in his work, commerce, which had dominated the organisation of capitalism up until then, is relegated to an intermediary role. In volume three of Capital for example, Marx argues that “commercial capital is confined to the circulation sphere and its sole function is to mediate the exchange of commodities” (Marx, 1981: 442). Christian Fuchs joins other recent writers in challenging this reading pointing to other passages where Marx assigns commercial capital a more central role and ‘where it dominates production directly’ (see Banaji, 2020: 9) As Fuchs points out, in the age of Amazon digital capitalism is welding commerce, production, finance and rent together into new and powerful combinations. Retrieving a comprehensive history of commercial capitalism is integral to a full analysis of this emerging complex.

My difficulties with Christian Fuchs’ reading begin with his exclusive focus on continuities between Khaldun and Marx.

Contested Political Economies: Marx, Smith and Khaldun

Fuchs joins the growing ranks of commentators arguing that Khaldun “deserves to be seen as a precursor of Marx “ ( Dale, 2006: 441). Whether Marx knew of Khaldun’s work remains an open question. A selection of Khaldun’s writings, translated by the distinguished Austrian orientalist, Joseph Hammer von Pugstall, appeared in German in 1810. In a piece for the New York Daily Tribune in 1854, commenting on the Crimean War which saw Britain and France allied with the Ottoman Empire against Russia, Marx refers to Pugstall’s argument, advanced in his history of the Ottomans published in 1827, that ‘the organisation of the Turkish Empire was already in a state of dissolution, and the epoch of Ottoman grandeur and strength had been rapidly disappearing for some time’ (Marx, 2010 [1854]). There are strong echoes here of Khaldun’s focus on the dynamics of dynastic decline. There is no direct reference to Khaldun in the archives of Marx’s writings but it is possible that, as a voracious reader, he had looked at Pugstall’s selections from Khaldun. We will never know but as Christian Fuchs demonstrates there are notable similarities in their approaches.

Like Marx, Khaldun’s thought is both materialist and dialectical, albeit in a version that sees internal contradictions generating recurrence rather than forward momentum, but much of what he has to say about concrete economic processes and relations fits the analytical framework later developed by classical, market-oriented, political economists (see Mouhammed, 2004). As Fuchs rightly emphasises, Khaldun is the first major thinker to propose a labour theory of value, but variants of this theory were developed by Smith and Ricardo as well as Marx. Khaldun’s free market supporters can also fairly claim him as the first to advance a well worked out model of the relations between supply, demand, and prices. Khaldun also introduced two arguments that later became central to classical political economy. He proposed a version of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in trade and acknowledged the necessity and productivity of the division of labour centuries before Adam Smith. But it is his views on the relations between markets and states, private enterprise, and collective provision that establish him as a precursor of neoliberalism.

Khaldun, like Adam Smith, subscribes to a minimalist, ‘night watchman’ model of the state. The primary responsibilities of the government are to uphold property rights, ensure that business can be conducted in a safe and secure environment and administer a legal system that enforces fair dealing and adjudicates on complaints of malpractice. Khaldun, who worked extensively in courts of law and was a professor of law later in life, would have readily agreed with Smith’s conclusion that ‘Society may subsist . . . among different merchants from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection . . . but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it’ (Smith, 1969 (1759): 124–125).

Khaldun, again like Smith, endorsed public expenditure on projects that advanced commerce. He supported upgrading transportation infrastructures and underwriting centres of scientific knowledge but saw responsibility for welfare provision as a private responsibility. This was ‘outsourced’ to the charitable foundations (awqaf) funded by rich individuals as acts of piety. These built schools and hospices as well as mosques using revenues from ownership of ‘urban real estate (shops, markets, houses) to fund maintenance’ (Zubaida, 2005–2006: 117). Together with schools of law, they provided an institutional base for a public sphere.

Khaldun’s ideal state spent the minimum necessary needed to guarantee external defence and internal order, operated with the minimum necessary public bureaucracy, and kept taxes to a minimum to encourage the private investment and demand need to support economic growth (see Karatas, 2006). As he argues,

When tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase, because low taxes bring satisfaction. (Khaldun, 1967: 230)

This case for keeping taxes as low as possible is the founding myth of neoliberal economics. To the surprise of most of his listeners, Ronald Reagan quoted Khaldun in his September 1981 speech to the Illinois Forum Reception in Chicago announcing the tax cuts at the centre of his neoliberal programme.

Missing Militarism

Reagan’s boosterism passed over a major problem, the growing dependence of the US economy on government military expenditure and the consolidation of what a past Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, had dubbed, the ‘military industrial’ complex. Khaldun lived and worked in a succession of militarised states. Continuing external threats to dynastic security required increasing outlays on defence, installing a military-commercial complex at the heart of the economy. As Khaldun points out, if the military is insufficiently funded and ‘decreases in number . . . the military defence of the dynasty is weakened, and the power of the dynasty declines’ (Khaldun, 1967: 134–135) . As a journalist, Marx reported on several major wars but his account of capitalism does not provide a sustained analysis of the economic, political, and symbolic importance of the military. The manufacture of threat and the struggle between civil and military interests remain central features of contemporary conditions. We live in a world characterised by regime collapses, military coups, civil insurgencies, and armed threats and skirmishes between major powers. Retrieving Khaldun’s analysis is a salutary reminder of the enduring centrality of military and security requirements in directing both the overall organisation of capitalism, the balance of internal and geopolitical power and the development and deployment of communications.

Ideology, Religion, and Fundamentalism

As Fuchs notes, Khaldun is unsparing in his condemnation of the myths, lies, distortions and untruths rulers deploy to sustain their grip on power. In the age of fake news and conspiracy theories, the quotations he offers are startingly familiar. But there is a missing link in the argument.

Khaldun lived in a culture centred around a religious world view anchored in a text presented as the morally binding word of God. Ideology critique has tended to assume that capitalist belief systems are predominantly secular and paid comparatively little attention to the continuing role of religious schemas. Faced with the upsurge of fundamentalist movements in all of the world’s major religions, and their political deployment, this is no longer sustainable.

Fundamentalist systems insist on the absolute opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’, believers and infidels. They are readily deployed in ideological offensives designed to mobilise hostility to other cultures and adherents to other religions and none. Donald Trump’s insistence that America is a Christian culture and his demonisation of Islam is a notable recent example, but his authoritarian populism also opposes an idealised past to a degraded present and promises restoration. In the Islamic cultures of Khaldun’s time, sectarian movements repeatedly promoted utopian visions of a pristine original Islamic era betrayed by corrupt and self-serving power holders. As a consequence, “the potential for principled revolt and possible regime change was endemic in Muslim societies” (Eisenstadt, 2006: 312).

We see this fundamentalist dialectic of ideological closure and restoration played out across a range of contemporary locations. Afghanistan under the reimposed rule of the Taliban and the Guidance Patrols’ zealous policing of public behaviour in the Islamic Republic of Iran are obvious examples. The same basic dynamic underpins Donald Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Great Again’ and the removal of ‘corrupting’ books from public libraries and school curricula by campaigns organised by core supporters embracing fundamentalist variants of evangelical Christianity.

Communication Revisited: Speaking, Writing and Printing

In contrast to his rich analysis of the multiple contexts shaping communications, Khaldun wrote comparatively little about its organisation and uses. There are, however, exceptions.

Christian Fuchs highlights the contrast Khaldun draws between ‘verbal expression’ and ‘written communication’ ‘of one’s thoughts to persons who are out of sight, or bodily far away, or to persons who live later and whom one has not met’. Khaldun was not the first author to distinguish between face-to-face and mediated communication. It was central to all three ‘religions of the book’ (Islam, Judaism and Christianity). All went to great pains to preserve valued copies of Holy texts for future generations alongside public readings, sermons and collective prayers designed to animate the faithful. Situating Khaldun’s general remarks within this concrete historical context poses interesting questions.

The spoken word was central to medieval Islamic culture. The call to prayer rang out five times daily across every city and town and educated believers were expected to recall and quote substantial passages from the Quran. This orality sat alongside a distinctive written culture. Manuscripts in Medieval Europe were written on velum (calf skins), an expensive material, time-consuming to prepare, restricting book ownership to religious and monied elites. In contrast, Islamic societies were early adopters of paper-making techniques imported from China using cheap wood pulp and rags. Paper facilitated the wide circulation of books assembled from multiple pages and bound into portable artefacts. But texts remained handwritten. In contrast to the ‘necessary’ crafts of agriculture, architecture, tailoring, carpentry and weaving, needed to deliver food, clothing and dwellings, calligraphy and bookbinding were classified as ‘noble crafts’, together with singing, medicine and midwifery, (Spengler, 1964: 283–284). Accomplished calligraphers were in high demand and highly valued and many ‘had scripts named after them’ (Shatzmiller, 2013: 63). The weight attached to the written word was reinforced by the prohibition on depictions of people and animals in religious texts (although they were permitted in secular writings).

Before Gutenberg introduced printing in Europe, block printing, adopted from China, was used to mass produce Qur’anic extracts on thin, portable, strips of paper for personal devotions (Roper, 2008). Books, however, were not widely printed in Islamic societies until the 19th century. As a consequence, Ibn Khaldun moved within an intellectual and symbolic milieu produced by a ‘combined oral-manuscript culture in which the “fixity” of print didn’t yet exist’ (Striphas, 2023: 82).

Books have since become and remain an integral part of contemporary mediated culture, but some of the most popular uses of digital media are combining writing and spoken address in new ways. Meetings convened on Zoom spring to mind. At the same time, we are witnessing new techniques of ‘fixity’ as the production of durable records moves from print to data storage.

Some observers, confronted with the seemingly absolute control over their domains exercised by the heads of the major digital major platforms, have compared them to feudal lords (see for example Brevini and Swiatek, 2021). Other commentators have characterised digital capitalism more generally as a Neo Feudal formation (see Dean, 2020). Critics have dismissed this argument as unhelpful and misleading (Morozov, 2022) but as a thought experiment that punctures the relentless ‘presentism’ and ideology of technologically driven ‘progress’ that underpins much work on ‘new’ media, it has raised issues that might otherwise have gone unexamined. A parallel case can be made for revisiting the technological, economic, political and cultural infrastructures that organised Ibn Khaldun’s pre-industrial communicative environment and looking again at subsequent transformations in the interaction, circulation and preservation of speech, writing and imagery.

Rebuilding the House of Wisdom: De-Westernisation as Dialogue

Beyond arguments around specific issues, Christian Fuchs’ reading of Khaldun raises more general questions about de-westernising the academy and engaging with contributions from outside the privileged intellectual enclaves of the Global North.

It is almost a quarter of a century now since James Curran and Myung-jin Park published De-Westernising Media Studies challenging established communication scholars to reorient research and theorising to take ‘account of the experience of countries outside the Anglo- American orbit’ (Curran and Park, 2000: 11). Responses to this challenge have generated substantial and growing bodies of work. The turn to the market in economies previously organised around strong central direction, led by China, India, South Korea and the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and the pursuit of marketisation in Latin America and Africa, has led to an upsurge of studies interrogating shifting relations between capital, communications and state formations. Much of this work, however, continues to centre on developments, in particular nations and regions, a focus reinforced by the proliferation of geographically defined journals and professional associations. The result is intellectual ‘Balkanisation’ as debate is corralled into self-defined enclaves (Waisbord, 2015). Comparative studies offer a partial counterweight with research moving from its original focus on countries in Europe and North America (Hallin and Mancini, 2006) to include a wider range of national conditions (Hallin, 2012) but the selection of cases and criteria for comparison remain open to challenge.

Nor does the very welcome expansion of university departments and research centres of sociology and communication studies across the Global South necessarily guarantee a more plural intellectual arena. There is a tendency for recent arrivals to bolster claims for acceptance by demonstrating command of the dominant methods and concepts minted in the Western academy and required for publication in the high-ranking journals demanded by university promotion committees.

Faced with attacks from conservative religious critics, concerned that established beliefs would be diluted or replaced, Isaq al-Kindi, one of the leading figures in the Baghdad translation movement, insisted that ‘we must not be ashamed to admire the truth or to acquire it, from wherever it comes. Even if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples’ (quoted in Mac Sweeney, 2023).

In our own time, the intellectual domination of the Metropolitan North has fostered ‘a common sense in which other logics of knowledge seen exotic, objectionable or downright crazy’ ( Connell, 2014: 218) Raewyn Connell proposes countering this by acknowledging the range and value of Southern Theory grounded in the specific histories of the Global South and the multiple encounters with Western colonization and imperialism (Connell, 2007), not as ‘an alternative paradigm to be erected in opposition to the hegemonic concepts’ but as an integral contribution to a more open dialogue around common challenges. (Connell, 2014: 218). Constructing a genuinely cosmopolitan intellectual space faces major challenges. It requires both a substantial redistribution of material academic resources and an honest engagement with challenges to the Enlightenment values that have underpinned Western intellectual life and critical theory. Re-reading Khaldun is an essential starting point not only as a demonstration of communalities and enduring issues but as a reminder of the value of reading and thinking across borders and listening attentively to other voices. Arguably, our most important task is to rebuild the House of Wisdom for contemporary times. Christian Fuchs’ intervention is a productive contribution to this essential project, not only for the insights it offers, but also for the questions it raises.