Proceedings of the IISES Annual Conference, Sevilla, Spain

PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL CAUSES OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE ATTITUDE OF IBN KHALDUN

MOHAMMAD AKVAN , MAHMOOD SEYYED

Abstract:

Every society, whether simple and elementary or complex and advanced, has changed in the historical context. This change has always been due to some reasons which have absorbed historians', philosophers' and researchers' attention. In fact, change and transformation have been considered as integral parts, inherent nature and internal features of human societies. What matter is that every change and transformation happens because of some reasons that have historical, cultural, political and social roots, all of which realize in the context of history and force the human society to experience change and transformation. Ibn Khaldun as a social researcher and history philosopher has constantly paid attention to the inherent dynamics and internal upheaval of the human society and discussed its movement course, quality of change procedure in the context of history. He concerned both short-term and long-term changes. He has spent time seeking such social changes. Ibn Khaldun' attitude to social changes can be considered as a kind of evolutionism, because he in his historical explanation and analysis of human communities and relevant processes, looked at both evolution and its causes and also various stages of social transformation and its features. In fact, from Ibn Khaldun's point of view, movement from a certain kind of community to another takes place in a longitudinal link and communities are located in cyclic and evolutionary process, that is, every community comes into existence and takes steps to perfection, it begins its downward trend then, finally changes into another one. What matters in the attitude of Ibn Khaldun, is that he never believes this cyclic and evolutionary movement of communities and their repeatability to be algebraic and uniform. In his opinion this movement is a kind of evolution and creation accompanied by growth and perfection. Thus societies emerge, are formed, grow and develop, eventually are transformed, but their existence signs, that is, culture and civilization never disappear completely and just are transferred from one community to another. So another community with previous cultural background and civilization is formed in another horizon. Therefore, in Ibn Khaldun's view, change and transformation is not a closed cycle but it has an open horizon toward perfection and progress. In this article, efforts have been made to study the historical, philosophical causes of social changes and transformation from Ibn Khaldun's perspective.

Keywords: Ibn Khaldun, social transformation, social evolution, perfectionism, cyclic movement , evolutionary movement .

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2018.035.002

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