The Birth of New Social Sciences


According to Ibn Khaldun, history has two forms, external and internal. For the most part, history before him was narrated as an external history in the form of a chronology of reports. There were important exceptions to this, most notably the accounts in the Quran, which always have parables and analysis for our guidance narrated with the history. Such internal history, in which there is an analytical study of events, was what Ibn Khaldun was interested in. Thus, he undertook the task of writing the Book of Ibaar (wise lessons from history).

He writes in his preface about his theory of history or historiography.  He describes how he developed the solution to the problem of scrutinizing the historical accounts based on their veracity. The traditional method that Islamic historical narrations used was to study the authority of the chain of narrators of a historical report critically which Ibn Khaldun supplemented with a new science he developed -- the Science of Culture -- to validate the historical facts mentioned in a report.

Ibn Khaldun provides 12 types of historical discrepancies and shows how he can identify them using various methods, the most significant being by the use of the Science of Culture. It involved studying the society in the historical report based on their social, political, economic, etc. contexts to see if the narration is true or false. For example, a historical report mentioning the number of Israelites coming out of the Sinai desert can be analyzed using a wide variety of social analyses to see if the reported number might be exaggerated. 

The writing of history thus led to the spawning of multiple forms of social sciences that were primarily used in the Science of Culture to analyze history for its accuracy.

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