Ibar - Deriving Wisdom from History

It is interesting that Ibn Khaldun does not call his book of history Kitaab at Tareekh, rather he calls it Kitaab al Ibar. Ibar is the plural of ibra (or ibrat in Urdu), which roughly translates as "admonition", "lesson", "inference" or "wisdom". This reflects Ibn Khaldun's perspective of history. Rather than considering history just as annals of chronological records as was done previously, he adopted a Quranic perspective with respect to historical events.

The Quran is full of ibar, which the believers are supposed to recognize and learn form. Everything in the Quran is a ayat (sign) of Allah that requires to be noticed, pondered on and teach us something important. Thus, Ibn Khaldun naturally extrapolated the concept of ibar and applied it to all of history so that wisdom might be inferred from recorded events of the past.

With this mindset, Ibn Khaldun laid the foundation of the philosophy of history and developed a new historiography - the methodology by which history is to be studied. Leveraging his extensive experience interacting with different people in different places, as well as a deep personal experience and insight into the power politics of the rise and fall of states, he applied the methodology of ibar, using reasoning to derive lessons from historical events.

Today, the modern equivalent of Ibn Khaldun's derivation of ibar from history can be considered to be the application of machine learning to mine data warehouses for trends, insights and conclusions to "learn" from the historical corporate data. 

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