How significant is the term ‘condition’ (<i>ḥāl</i>) to understanding Ibn Khaldūn's historical and political thought? <i>Al-ʿaṣabiyya</i> as an ‘essential condition’ of human association
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay offers an interpretation of the term al-ʿaṣabiyya in Al-Muqaddima by Ibn Khaldūn, by situating it among the ‘essential conditions’ of human association, which are necessary for the preservation of civilisation. Political authority is necessary for human association, but it can be acquired, Ibn Khaldūn says, only by al-ʿaṣabiyya. Al-ʿaṣabiyya is the required condition (sharṭ); by means of its power, the goal of rulership is attained. This essay begins by examining the term ‘condition’ and explains what Ibn Khaldūn means by the ‘nature of conditions’, the ignorance of which constitutes one of the reasons that had prompted him to write Al-Muqaddima. Using that interpretation, it then shows that al-ʿaṣabiyya, which is a power of unity among individuals and groups built to gain political authority, is based on manufactured connections and constructed compassion. The examination of the different textual circumstances shows that the form of al-ʿaṣabiyya that ‘guarantees’ political authority is a composite of different ʿaṣabiyyāt, one of which is the leading ʿaṣabiyya. Therefore, in the political context, I argue that Ibn Khaldūn uses the term al-ʿaṣabiyya in the sense of the ‘grand’ ʿaṣabiyya and not the ‘natural’ ʿaṣabiyya, which no one can eliminate. The construction of the ‘grand’ ʿaṣabiyya happens by thinking because the intention to create something, he says, requires thinking about the order of things and an awareness of the reason, cause, or condition (sharṭ) of that thing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".