Overview

The author of this book has a sociological imagination that has made him consider the huge world volume of social sciences like several pyramids built through the ages, where Ibn Khaldun inaugurated the building of the first pyramid in his famous book, The Muqaddimah. Ibn Khaldun's innovative social science work is the outcome of multiple factors, among which are his creative personality that allowed him to perceive and capture the dynamics of latent and manifest features of Muslim societies, particularly in North Africa, which other scholars failed to do. Furthermore, his scholarly vision had set his path to achieve great success in being the social science pioneer in the entire world. He had a critical view of Arab Muslim historiography: Arab and Muslim historians had pitfalls in their methodology and in the analysis of historical events. In the views of Ibn Khaldun and Thomas Kuhn, their works were hardly credible. Thus, there was a pressing need to solve the Arab Muslim historiography's crisis. The Muqaddimah's new sociological perspective, according to both Yves Lacoste and Arnold Toynbee, is an exceptional intellectual piece of work. Professor Dhaouadi believes that The Muqaddimah constitutes a new paradigm to meet that crisis. In Kuhn's terms, The Muqaddimah sets the pace for reforming the science of Arab Muslim Historiography by shifting from what Kuhn calls normal science to revolutionary science. Ibn Khaldun's sociological approach is inclusive (it stresses the influence of both latent and manifest factors in shaping society and individual behaviours); he was unlike Positivist contemporary social scientists, who give prominent role to manifest factors. They are rather exclusive social scientists. One may claim that The Muqaddimah has revolutionized the relation between the disciplines of history and sociology in North Africa and the Arab Muslim world by affirming that 'good historians must be first of all good sociologists.'

Full Product Details

9798895434734

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Mahmoud Dhaouadi was born in a rural region called Zreeba near the towns of Kalaatal-Andalus and Aousdja in the northeast of Tunisia where no formal school existed. His father hired teachers (called in Tunisian dialect Midbiyya) to teach his children in the so-called Quttab (place for learning the Quran and writing and reading Arabic). Mahmoud studied his secondary education in the Zeituna school where Arabic is the single teaching language of all subjects, unlike most of the other Tunisian schools. His higher education was in USA and Canada, where he received a BA in psychology and an MA and Ph.D. in sociology. He taught at universities worldwide. Professor Dhaouadi has published over 30 interdisciplinary books, over 215 essays, long and short articles, along with book reviews, in Arabic, English, and French. His leading recent books in English are Humans as Third Dimensional Beings, Cultural Sociology Within Innovative Treatise, and Globalization of the Other Underdevelopment and in Arabic: Cultural Sociology's Shortcomings and Is Teaching in ForeignLanguages a Handicap or Beneficial for Native Languages and Identities?

Tab Content 6

Countries Available