Ibn Khaldun on Pandemic: Rulers Without Rational Temper Ruin Their Existence Amidst the Havoc Wreaked by Pandemics
By P.K. Yasser Arafath
29.06.20
Why would the reading of a 14th-century African-Arabic text, Muqaddimah, and its author, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), be of interest to us in the 21st century? This question takes us to a wider discussion that will show how a pre-modern thinker made certain cogent and universal arguments about the relationship between political leadership and the complexities of pandemics. Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah seems to be the first text that explained the intrinsic relationship between a political leadership and the management of pandemics in the pre-colonial period.
A
bust of Ibn Khaldoun in Béjaïa, Algeria
(Wikimedia
Commons)
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Khaldun explained why rulers must fear pandemics and be concerned about the management of public health and hygiene. As pandemics have indisputable capacities to shift the centres of power, Khaldun argued that rulers without administrative skills and rational temper would ruin their existence amidst the havoc wreaked by pandemics. Khaldun was a victim of ‘Black Death’, the catastrophic plague that devastated a number of royal courts, cultural communities and big cities across Europe, Asia and Africa in the mid-14th century. His ideas about post-pandemic situations certainly came from his witnessing how the inter-continental contagion annihilated the most powerful among the ‘nations’ in the 14th century.
This 1562 painting,
“The Triumph of Death,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, illustrates the deep
impression left on the European imagination by the epidemics and wars that
ravaged society.
PHOTOGRAPH BY
ORONOZ/ALBUM
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Khaldun wanted the political leadership to understand that pandemics have the capacity to destroy civilizations, urban centres and rulers, irrespective of their prosperity and military superiority. According to him, contagions like the Great Plague “swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out.” Historically, such pandemics had the capacity to overtake “the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration” and, in the process, challenged their “power and curtailed their [rulers’] influence...” Cities, buildings and houses “were laid to waste” and “roads and way-signs... obliterated” during the Great Plague, resembling what one is witnessing today. People moved from their settlement zones and many dynasties and communities “grew weak”. What we call ‘pandemic migration’ was a matter of destruction for Khaldun. He categorically asserted that rulers who don’t care about their vulnerable subjects during calamities caused the whole population to vanish.
Black Death
Flagellants in the
Netherlands scourging themselves in atonement, believing that the Black Death
is a punishment from God for their sins, 1349.
© Photos.com/Thinkstock
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Khaldun
also linked the health of people with the intellectual health of rulers. For
him, the real cure for diseases was a well-knit State under a wise political
leadership. Unscrupulous rulers who pay scanty attention to medical care, air
quality, water, food and hygiene make their fall inevitable. Thus, cities
collapsed and dynasties fell as unwise rulers did not read the situation
rationally; nor did they arrange medical care for the victims of epidemics.
Khaldun, therefore, laid out various responsibilities for the State to ensure
the health of the people, including arrangements for physicians working under
adverse conditions.
Rulers who are only concerned with the well-being of their “inner circle and their parties” are an incurable “disease”. States with such rulers can get “seized by senility and the chronic disease from which [they] can hardly ever rid [themselves], for which [they] can find no cure”, and, eventually, be destroyed. Looking at the different functionaries of the State as the different organs of the human body, Khaldun enunciates that when senile rulers ruin the foundations of the nations they rule, “the feelings of the people of the dynasty become diseased as a result of the contempt in which they are held and the hostility of the ruler. They hate him and await the opportunity of a change in his fortune.”
Second pandemic of the
Black Death in Europe
The second pandemic of
the Black Death in Europe (1347–51).
Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.
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To thwart
calamities, rulers should possess certain qualifications. Khaldun recognizes
wisdom, logic, honesty, justice and education as the most desirable qualities
in a ruler. Only such rulers could become patrons of scientific knowledge, have
scholar-friends, possess a mind for common good and generate employment. Such
desirable qualities would ensure that the civilizational process is productive
and that the recovery from the injuries of calamities are faster. Similarly,
undesirable rulers are the ones who are loud-mouthed, self-indulgent,
war-mongers and corrupt. They spend excessive money on self-promotion.
The rulers
who keep the company of wise ministers, bureaucrats, counsellors and scholars
would be the ones who would tackle pandemics well, while the ones who keep
ignoble entourage are bound to perish. They weaken the production of scientific
knowledge and technology. People refrain from knowledge activities because such
unscrupulous rulers fear rational negotiations based on science, medical
knowledge and technological advancements.
Analysing
the relationship among knowledge, scientific temper, rational behaviour and a
critical population, Khaldun was persuasive about constant improvisation of the
sciences and technology as the two fundamental prerequisites for the survival
of the State. A dispossessed intellectual class and the collapse of
knowledge-producing communities could bring civilizational and dynastic
decline. Therefore, the State has to provide material resources and
infrastructures for the improvisation of scientific explorations. Adding a
phenomenological coda to the Aristotelian idea of popular rationality, Khaldun
argued that the moment ordinary men stopped thinking, rulers became autocrats
and narcissists.
The absence of a critical mass is what they
desire the most as it permits them to impose their will from above. The
Muqaddimah not only broadens our understanding of a particular political
theory, but also positions the centrality of intellect in the survival of the
State.
The
incredulous attitude of many modern rulers towards Covid-19 shows that the
Muqaddimah remains relevant. The unscientific measures to control the pandemic
suggested by Donald Trump, the indifference of Boris Johnson, the absurdities
of Kim Jong-un and the theatrics of Narendra Modi have revealed the
universalism of Khaldun’s thoughts when it comes to the relationship among
pandemics, good governance and a thinking population. Protected by the media
and living among a pliant entourage, these leaders force us to wonder whether
Khaldun had foreseen their emergence.
Original
Headline: The text that saw the future
Source:
The Telegraph India
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/books-documents/ibn-khaldun-pandemic-rulers-without/d/122251
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