Ibn Khaldûn as a Colonial Archive: Toward an Epistemic Decolonization

Abstract This article examines Ibn Khaldûn not as a stable, timeless precursor of modern social science but as a figure constituted through colonial translation and reception. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English translations of the Muqaddimah , it argues that Ibn Khaldûn emerged in modern scholarship as a colonial archive—a site where translation, race, and epistemic authority intersected to produce new forms of historical and sociological knowledge. Through close comparison of Arabic originals and their European translations, the article shows how colonial epistemologies reconfigured Ibn Khaldûn’s analytical categories—particularly those concerning tribe, generation, civilization, and climate—into racialized frameworks foreign to his medieval context. It further demonstrates how this translated Ibn Khaldûn became selectively relevant to European social science while remaining excluded from its canonical genealogies. Finally, the article critically reassesses the enduring claim that Ibn Khaldûn articulated racist views about Black populations, showing that this attribution itself belongs to the colonial archive generated through translation rather than to the epistemic logic of the original text. The article thus contributes to comparative histories of knowledge, colonial epistemology, and the global formation of the social sciences.