Cool Concepts
From Issue: 535 [Read full issue]
Religion and State
"Human beings require cooperation for the preservation of the species, and they are by nature equipped for it. Their labour is the only means at their disposal for creating the material basis for their individual and group existence. Where human beings exist in large numbers, a division of activities becomes possible and permits greater specialization and refinement in all spheres of life. The result is umran (civilization or culture), with its great material and intellectual achievements, but also with a tendency toward luxury and leisure which carries within itself the seeds of destruction."
- From 14th-century Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah
On of Ibn Khaldun's best-known studies relates to the rise and decline of civilizations, and it is this that laid down the foundations of social science, the science of civilization and sociology. He explains how civilization and culture breed their own decline. They have a natural development into luxury, which produces moral laxity and depravity, until decay sets in, ending the dissolution of the formerly healthy society, which gradually becomes corrupted and hurries to its extinction.
He saw that society or civilization had a cyclical nature. It rose up because of a common need for protection and domination, reached a peak when the social bonds were at their strongest, before declining, and perished when group support and social bonds became diluted because of unhealthy competition and corruption at times of prosperity.
In Ibn Khaldun's mind, the only thing that could counteract the disintegrative forces, inherent in every nation, was religion. He said that Islam gave a community a lasting spiritual content, a complete answer to all problems of life; that it furnished the complete answer to his empirical inquiry into the organization of the human race. He saw religion as an absolute necessity for a really united and effective state.
Compiled From:
"1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World" - Salim T S Al-Hassani, pp. 275 - 277