Ibn Khaldun’s Revolutionary Scientific Thought within Kuhn’s Perspective

This paper attempts to take a non-traditional oulook at Ibn Khaldun’s innovative social science work in his Muqaddimah which is usually seen as the outcome of Ibn Khaldun ‘s rich beduin-sedentary experience in the Arab Muslim societies in North Africa. He was very critical of Arab Muslim Historiography : Arab and Muslim historians had pitfalls in their methodology and in the analysis of historical events. Their works were hardly credible. According to the views of Ibn Khaldun and Thomas Khun, there was a pressing need to solve the Arab Muslim Historiography ‘s crisis. The Muqaddimah’s new sociological perspective - born for the first time in North Africa in the history of human universal thought , according to Yves Lacoste and Arnold Toynbee - 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 Khun calls normal science to revolutionary science. Ibn Khaldun invented the law of the Mutabaqa (conformity) which requires that human historical events must match well the real worldly multiple factors involved in their making., 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 : good historians must be first o all good sociologists.