Authors

• Golam Reza Jamshidiha ¹
• Mohsen Saboorian ²

¹ Associate Professor of Tehran University

² PhD Candidate in Theoric- Cultural Sociology, University of Tehran

Abstract

 In his Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun, suggests a kind of historical thought which sharply differs from historiography of his contemporary age and even after. In this approach, instead of emphasizing on events and traditionary methods, historiographer tries to find the nature of historical events, their causes, and their effects on the subsequent events. This new approach to history, which can be called scientific, critical or reflective history, has its own method, which is not explicitly raised in the Muqaddimah. The main content of Muqaddimah is the new science of Umran, by which narrative history can be elevated to reflective history, nevertheless he did not clarified his methodology of the new science in historical explanations. Therefor science of Umran is responsible to learning nature of human societies, which helps our historical understanding. Though the problem is how to verify truth of a historical narrative? In this article we tried to understand the logic behind historical explanation and causation in the Muqaddimah. The result was that, though the aim of the science of Umran was to make a reflective history, its material was not only reason, but both intellectual (e.g. natural philosophy) and narrative sciences (e.g. jurisprudence) may help.

Keywords

• Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah
• Narrative History
• Logic of History
• Historical Explanation
• Historical Causation