The Polymath

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Albert Hourani, with whom I had the good fortune to study Middle Eastern history during my time at Oxford University, used to admit that he often found it very hard to dissuade students who came to study for graduate degrees with him from writing about Ibn Khaldun. This was particularly the case with students from the Middle East itself. The number of studies devoted to various aspects of the life and thought of this great Tunisian-born scholar, our ‘polymath,’ is certainly large, but there can be little doubt that his status in the world of history and historiography is fully deserved. For not only were his works written from the unique perspective of someone who was born, raised, and educated in the Western parts of the Arab-Islamic dominions (the Maghrib — the Arabic word implying the place where the sun sets, the West), but also his penchant for theorizing about the phenomena that turned the region into such a turbulent place in which to live and work has traditionally been viewed as the beginning of what has since emerged as the social-scientific method. And now Bensalem Himmich has taken the interest one stage further by turning this historian and his historical surroundings into the topic of a novel.

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