In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.

This transcription from the Forum is devoted to Ibn Khaldun. Here, Jocelyne Dakhlia and Justin Stearns discuss Ibn Khladun with Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective, and examine his unique work, The Muqaddimah.

Omar Berrada: Please take a seat, this is our last session for today. We are going back in time and we will devote this session to Ibn Khaldun. For those of you don't know him I won't tell you right now who he is because you will know enough in an hour. To speak about Ibn Khaldun we have two historians; Jocelyne Dakhlia, who has come from Paris, is a historian at the L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She writes about medieval Islam, power in medieval Islam, and the role of Islam in European history. One of her recent books is A History of The Lingua Franca, a mixed language that travelled in time and space across the Mediterranean. It's a very fascinating social, political, and linguistic history.

We also have with us Justin Stearns who lives not far from here and teaches history at NYU Abu Dubai. He is interested in the history of Al Andalus and North Africa, and in particular in the relationships between science and religion in Muslim and Christian thought. His book on the plague and theories of contagion in the Middle Ages is titled Infectious Ideas, Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean.

To speak with them about Ibn Khaldun we have Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who is an artist, writer, curator, researcher, and theorist. He is also one of the members of the Raqs Media Collective in Delhi. He had a past life, which is probably also part of his present life, which consisted of reading and studying medieval scholastic texts. The last time I saw him, which I think was also the first time I saw him in person, was last November at Tate Modern, London, at a conference organised by Ibraaz. He mentioned Al-Kindi, a ninth century Islamic philosopher. Now he's moving us to the fourteenth century with Ibn Khaldun, and I leave the floor to him.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta: Thank you, Omar. At least we are moving forward in time from the ninth to the fourteenth century. Meanwhile… History, Meanwhile… Elsewhere; a man is checking his mobile phone underneath the work of art at the Dhaka Art Summit, which is called Meanwhile...Elsewhere. A set of clocks suspended over the city skyline with words framing hours and time. Here you see two such pairs, mukhtuj haram which means free fall, or it could mean the melting of pearls, takes us back to the first panel of the day, and [inaudible]the search for poison which takes us perhaps into some of the things that I'm going to talk about with you.

The last time I was in the Global Art Forum in Dubai in 2010 my colleague Monica Narula and I spent an hour undertaking a brief flurry into the legacy of Ibn Khaldun, focusing, almost by accident, on his evocation of the mystery of lost and forgotten cities. I always like to say that all cities will one day be lost and forgotten. Iran of the Sands the Great, the city of Iran which was famed in the Iranian peninsula, was lost. Ibn Khaldun talks about how to find Iran, back then it was just a rumour. Someday Dubai, Delhi, and New York will be rumours; people will say 'there was once a Dubai.'

Four years later here I am again. Ibn Khaldun, meanwhile, is still on his perch in Tunis, while I am here with The Muqaddimah still hanging over me, introducing this panel in which Shumon has asked me to once again remember Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun is remembered all the time because he is forgotten all the time. I come from Delhi, a dusty, landlocked city in Hindustan, south Asia. One of the greatest intellectuals that came from my part of the world, a man called Iqbal Ahmed, had once dreamt of founding a university for the humanities not far from my city but in another country, a university which would revive the traditions of free and open thinking that our histories were once home to.

Somewhere in Pakistan he wanted to found a university that he liked to call Khaldunia, in honour of Ibn Khaldun. Of course the word 'dunia' in our language also means 'the world'; Khaldunia. He was given a parcel of land by the then Wazir, the premier of his country, and then his wife took that parcel away and built a golf course instead – that's the destiny of the humanities in our parts of the world. I hope her son can do better than that, apparently he was here. Khaldunia and Ibn Khaldun were once again buried in the sand.

Meanwhile, history did its work. Seasons came and went, generals and Wazirs did their job and left the buildings that they had occupied. The Arab spring came, moved onto the Arab winter and then to the Arab summer. In 2014, we seem once again to be living in a world that begins to look a lot like 1914, not a city but an entire aeroplane, on whose engine rests the entire world, especially the contemporary art world moves have disappeared.

Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth century historian, scholar and jurist, had a life that travelled the world, from Southern Spain to North Africa to Cairo, Hijaz and Syria. In Damascus he met the world conqueror of his time, Tamerlane, who was a great believer in the discernment of patterns. People looking for that plane are looking at patterns, they're trying to read the sky and the sea for signs. Ibn Khaldun was reading patterns, cycles of the rise and fall of dynasties, cultures and societies.

One of the key intellectual innovations brought by Ibn Khaldun in his discussions of history was how he distinguished events, known as Khabar, and tradition, known as hadith (which we are familiar with from other contexts). He made an argument which was revolutionary at the time and which continues to be radical today in terms of ways of thinking about events; he conceives of the novel and the new as aspects of life that are tangents to the explanatory frameworks of tradition, which both touch and miss it, within and without.

In other words, sometimes the events of our times require us to think using a set of terms which are not easily available to us. All that we can do then is to carefully look at the world and to try and understand what confronts us, not in terms of the authority of what has been before but in terms of what is not yet evident of truths that are still in formation, still making their claim to legitimacy, unknown, still unwilling or unable to become known.

While we look at this abandoned plane and think about things that are known and unknown, I'm going to read to you from a work of art that I very much like. This is Tirdad Zolghadr's work together with Shirana Shahbazi and Rachid Tehrani; I'm going to read to you a brief fragment which I think is important. This is a section called 'Know.' Donald Rumsfeld February 12^th, which is my birthday, 2002:

'Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns, we know this speech. There are things we know. There are things we know we know, we also know that there are known unknowns, that is to say we know there are things we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.'

The event or Khabar over the last three years in the Middle East, North Africa, in western south Asia, fall into this category, and the historians and philosophers of the future, the true colleagues of the artists of the present, will heed the advice of Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun took dreams and dreaming very seriously, and right now there are people reading dreams for signs of the plane which you saw in the desert. Pay attention to the dreams in imaginary worlds brought by artists today. Patterns of the flacons in decline are the crux of questions of memory and amnesia, and although I am making a claim that artists of today are the allies of the historians and philosophers of tomorrow, I will complicate the statement immediately by saying that contemporary art has a real problem with amnesia.

Our memory is full of holes, just as the Earth beneath us is now increasingly riddled with holes, and Dubai is full of holes, with oil wells under the sea floor with flaking apparatuses, anchors, and underground repositories of all kinds. There's even a repository somewhere in the desert where all the shit goes. There is some footage from Dubai in a work of art which shows how all the sewage from the migrant workers' housing is taken away by trucks, not a pipeline, because if you had a pipeline then there would be stability. This is a world built on instability, it's a world built on sand. Trucks take the sewage to the holes in the ground in the desert – it's full of holes.

To understand these holes I need to read to you from another Iranian. This is a man I'm reading right now and who I am obsessing over somewhat. His name is Reza Negarestani and he is the author of a book called Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which, to my mind, is a kind of Muqaddimah for today. It's Khaldunian in its overarching, all-encompassing desire to understand the madness of this world. 'Of all nomads traversing the Earth, those most radical in their forging of war machines under the minimum influence of climatologic factors are the desert nomads.' This is Ibn Khaldun – straightforward, right?

'That is why both the re-nomadisation of the Wahhabistic state of Saudi Arabia through desert militarism belonging to the desert nomad, and as the semi-sedentarization of nomads by the state, and the metamorphosis into the semi-sedentarization of nomads by the state, and the metamorphosis into Naphthenes – what a great word, Naphthenes – Naphthenes, neo-nomad. Clandestine petro-nomads who roam between oil fields instead of oases were inevitable.'

Think of the tension in a state like this, in the Emirates, between the migrant Naphthenes neo-nomads who come to build and un-build, and the sedentary state which tries to plan for the future. Think back to Falconcity and what it might mean as an Iran of the Sands, that sometime, desolate futurity. What this means is that it creates this fume, the fume of petroleum, and all that it generates creates a kind of space of forgetfulness, of fogginess, in the brain, which Reza Negarestani calls the holey (as in holes meaning apertures) – the holey space of petroleum. High on energy, low on recall, we barely remember what happened at the last biennale, and each art fair consigns its predecessor to oblivion.

Our obsession with the ephemerality of the present means that we are often not just neglectful of the past, but also mindful of the future. In today's panel I have two excellent interlocutors who have worked extensively on the questions of contemporary memory and on the questions of memory and contagion. I find these two very productive and fertile ways to think; one about infections and another about remembering, and how what we remember might infect what we imagine. One of the questions I want to propose to both of them is to consider how we might see memory in history if we were to think of them as contagious agents; how might a memory infect the future?

Before I conclude, I want to leave with you a fragment from the Emirati poet and novelist Thani Al-Suwaidi's exceptional experimental novel, The Diesel. It features a gender-bending wedding dancer called The Diesel who is a kind of oracle of our times, a witness from the context of the region littoral to the Persian Gulf – the Trucial States, the Emirates – to the enormous transformations of our times.

Al Diesel says 'neighbour, what can I say?' (And I think that when somebody says neighbour I think they're talking to me because we are neighbours.) 'Neighbour, what can I say? All the fake lamentations of this world rail against the toil of ephemeral things. My lament, however, rails against the insanity of the toil in a time that we ignore and that ignores us, that consumes a time that is paralysed hand in foot and that consumes only the fruit of pride while we live out our days. Time laughs from inside a dance circle. Don't be afraid, who knows, perhaps it will transport us to another region of this existence. There we may confront time with just the same number of lamentations, moans which we will transmute to laughs until they die away. Why don't you say something.'

Jocelyne, why don't you say something?

Jocelyne Dakhlia: Thank you very much Shuddha for your talk, and thank you for this invitation. Speaking about memory and amnesia in relation to Ibn Khaldun is clearly a paradox because he is so famous and so celebrated across the world. However, there is a certain amnesia surrounding him. Speaking about amnesia and false memory, my first point is that there has been an orientalist forgery or lie, an illusion, a fallacy, that the Arabs had forgotten Ibn Khaldun for centuries. With the first translations of his writings into European languages in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was this idea that the Arabs did not read Ibn Khaldun for centuries until they had rediscovered him thanks to western scholars and translators.

This idea of the Arab world ignoring Ibn Khaldun until the 19^th century was very common and very consensual, even among Arab academics and even during the decolonisation years from the 1950s to the 1970s. We know today that this is a typically false memory and that, on the contrary, there was a continuous interest in Ibn Khaldun's writings in the Maghreb and in the Arab world. In the Ottoman world we know that, for instance, Ottoman historiographers tried to write history according to his pattern and he was commonly quoted. However, for years we agreed with the idea of Islamic decadence, including a lack of interest in Ibn Khaldun.

My second point on memory is that there has been a deep misunderstanding about Ibn Khaldun and his theory of history. He was an exceptional thinker, there is no doubt about it. And, as he was not modest, he himself explained to his reader why he was a genius. He says that he is a rationalist while the others believe in legends, but in The Muqaddimah he compares himself to his predecessors, especially At-Turtushi, Al-Masudi , Ibn al-Muqaffa' , and he recognises himself to be on a common ground of political wisdom. He pays tribute to them. He's like his peers at the heart of Islamic wisdom, the art of governing, and political literature.

Then in the second movement he reproaches his predecessors for having expanding this shared political thought in an encyclopaedic, rather than critical, way. According to him, they failed to connect it, as he himself proposed, to a power dynamic, to a cycle of dynasties. It is here that his well-known conception of the Assabiya as a driving force of Islamic political thinking figures. If we tried to be aware of this and be aware of the twentieth century historiography, we realise that Ibn Khaldun has been mainly, and wrongly, understood as a thinker of decline, and not only decline as a cycle, as he put it, but his historical pattern was taken as a metaphor or explanation for a global Arab or Islamic decadence in world history.

That's why during the reformist or nationalist era in the early 1920s and throughout the twentieth century there was such a strong consensus about The Muqaddimah all around the world – a contagion, even. There was a consensus among the Orientalists, and among the Arabs themselves, among the Arab lovers and among the Arab haters, that we had a wonderful, powerful model supposedly explaining a global decline and Islamic decline while speaking the modernist language of rationality. Of course, this was not Ibn Khaldun's purpose. His main purpose was the foundation of Imran, but we act as though he had anticipated the kind of collapse of history, especially in the 1970s, reading him from a modernist and developmentalist point of view.

His readers – and they were many at the time – understood the very concept of Assabiya as a root of retardation, an explanation for decline while ignoring its foundational power in Ibn Khaldun's thought. The Muqaddimah was very popular during the years of decolonisation and afterwards in the 1960s and 70s, but this went with a whole vision of Islamic history based on decline, based on the idea of an Arab decadence. On this point, since the Middle Ages one could speak of a kind of contagion process because the nationalist modernist logic was closed off to the orientalist quest for modernity, and this induced a whole process of amnesia.

Today, as a historian, I can assure you that this very idea of decline is being put apart not by any one historian, but by a growing trend of historians. We have to draw a very different interpretation of Islamic history, thus leading the way to a new memory of Ibn Khaldun, because the generation pattern, the retardation model, meant collective amnesia. We have to draw such a new history. In particular, we have to be very careful about Ibn Khaldun's exception. The more one emphasised Ibn Khaldun's genius the more one inculcated the idea that all the other thinkers of the Arab or Islamic world are the opposite of geniuses, simply uninteresting, backward compilers hardly worth reading and irrelevant to any problematic of modernity.

My last point is that such a vision of declining Arab culture, with the exception of Ibn Khaldun, had a broken relationship to time and history. What is at stake now is to rediscover what Ibn Khaldun shared with his peers and predecessors, and what his contemporaries shared with him. We are already aware that some of the most famous Khaldunian ideas were very common ideas at the time, such as the idea of initial impurity, the power of Bedouins tribes in political competition, and the moral strength of the Bedouins. But today the main issue seems to me to restore a more continuous vision of time and history, and thus to pay attention to the culture Ibn Khaldun shared with this world, to pay attention to their political language, including concepts of justice and social harmony – concepts that he recognised in common with his peers, with his contemporaries.

If we rehabilitate the corpus of political wisdom from which Ibn Khaldun's work emerged we would recover the whole political background that we sorely miss today; Islamic references to the foundation of just government, equity, and state legitimacy. We need this today when the issue of democracy so easily has the western world as its unique point of reference. I don't mean to say that Ibn Khaldun invented a democratic system, what I'm saying is that we should have in mind, in our memory, this legacy, a kind of common ground that the cultural world had in common when it came to concepts of just government which may incidentally have been shared by other cultures as well.

Ibn Khaldun is exceptional in that he proposes a theory of rational government, a political dynamic. Up until now we have paid more attention to the failing, declining part of this dynamic than to the ascending or the foundational part. After having been so receptive to the idea of loss and decadence, after having focused on decline, we could now focus on foundation, and on the process of foundation, the basis of political contract. This would be a renewed memory of Ibn Khaldun not as an exception, but as a primus inter pares, and this would give way to a more continuous vision of time and history.

If we think about it, our obsession with the present, contemporary artists' obsession with the present, as Shuddhabrata said, might be a consequence of such a shortening of Islamic history, a consequence of this common forgetfulness. Now we have to choose; is Ibn Khaldun still an exception, or is he both a path-breaker and a representative of his world, a world we should also consider as modern?

SS: Thank you very much. To take those foundations further, to dig deeper, I now invite Justin Stearns.

Justin Stearns: Thank you very much, I think I only have footnotes to offer to what has been said, I have nothing more to add in many ways. Perhaps to build on what you have just said, Jocelyne, when we look at Islamic history we often focus on single person and we make them tell stories for the whole civilisation, for all of Islamic history. There is no better example of this than Ibn Khaldun. You take someone and hold him up as a rational thinker and say that here we have a founder, a founder of sociology, a founder of a science of government, a way to think about the past rationally, a rational person in general. If you continue down this line, if you think about how Ibn Khaldun is represented, you'll hear the word rational and you'll hear the word modern a great deal, and as Jocelyne has pointed out, we take him out of his time, we take him and what he was and we make him one of us, ignoring everything else.

I think we could do this quite well with other figures, I think if (unclear as first and foremost but we can also tell a story about Al Ghazali which would usually be a sad story which involves the end of rational thought, and where everything is blamed on him. We can also tell an interesting story regarding Ibn Taymiyyah, the great hanbali thinker, who in his own time was an eccentric iconoclast and today gets blamed for the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia and Bin Laden among other things.

I would like us to move past this idea of giving Ibn Khaldun too much credit; it's perhaps ironic that we come here to cut Ibn Khaldun down to size in order to understand him better. So why the impetus to remember Ibn Khaldun? What is the impetus to place him here? Is it an attempt, one of many, I would argue, in the contemporary Arab world to try to find the modern inside the self and to say 'we've been here all along, we were here before you were ever here'? If so, it seems to be one which is destined for tragedy, one destined not to accept the self but to find the other instead.

It's good to go back and to remember who he was; he was a fourteenth century scholar, born in Tunis, who wandered through the Mediterranean to Morocco, to Al Andalus, across into Christian Liberia to the court of Pedro LaCure and then later east to Cairo and Levant where he met Tamerlane . He was a man of his time, who was, as we have heard, perhaps rather self-confident, a political intriguer, in many ways a rival to his older contemporary Ibn Al Khatib. A man who experienced massive trauma, who lost his family at sea, who lost his wife and children, who remarried later in life in Cairo, if we can believe the Moroccan novelist Bensalem Himmich who writes about him in the polymath.

So why is he so famous? Why this man, why was he singled out? Because he gives us an understanding of history in a systematic fashion, he moves beyond the chronicles, he announces principles on which we can base ourselves. As some historians have argued, among them Aziz Al-Azmeh, perhaps Ibn Khaldun tells us something about his time but perhaps he was formed by his time. Perhaps his theory comes from having seen what he did, which was a series of dynasties in North Africa, Berber dynasties, The Yamatos, each one of which conveniently only lasted for about three generations, which is exactly how long Ibn Khaldun thought dynasties should last.

You start in the desert, you start with the purity of your Bedouin's solidarity, of your Assabiya; you come into the urban area, you settle down, you begin to forget who you're related to, and you remember which city you're from instead. You lose that connection, and then by the time that you've fully planted the orange trees. It's important to remember here with the orange trees, these were not the oranges we know today. The problem with planting orange trees is that you're not growing oranges that are sweet, but oranges that are bitter, so they have no practical purpose. That was Ibn Khaldun's point regarding the orange trees: when you have time to plant things that have no practical purpose, that's when the next group of Bedouins arrives from the desert so they can get rid of you.

This relates to what you think of as a theory of history and it works practically for some periods but it doesn't work so well for the dynasties, such as the fall of North Africa. This is what makes them so attractive; the rationality of his thought, the ideal systematic process, which does distinguish him, it must be said, from many of his contemporaries. We find echoes of Ibn Khaldun in later writers, as Jocelyne has just said, but we seldom find anybody who has laid this out in such a systematic fashion. However, he was not forgotten and we can find specific samples of works rendered; one is the case of the seventeenth century Moroccan writer mystic logician Al-Yusi in his Al Muhadarat. He writes of similar prophecies and draws on very Khaldunian language on these issues.

I supposed I'm playing with a sense of resistance here; it's hard not to admire Khaldun, we're taught to admire Khaldun, we're inducted into a cult of Khaldunia in so many ways, but at the same time if we all too ardently remain in this cult then we forget the history as a whole, and in many ways we deny it. It's a process of wilful amnesia. I don't want to get too poetic in that direction, but there is also practical reason here which is to say the period of Islamic history that follows Ibn Khaldun, the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, is the very period that we understand least.

It's striking that for somebody so important, the vast majority of Al-Yusi's works have only been edited and printed in the last 15 years. We can imagine that in the next 20, 30, or 40 years, as more and more works are printed and come out to the public and are read and discussed by historians, we may then really understand how to get out of this notion of decline into a new narrative which will allow us to appreciate Ibn Khaldun as a primus inter pares an extraordinary one but not a modern man; not a rational man among non-rational men, but one of many. In that sense we need to take care with our remembering.

SS: Thank you. So, in the spirit of taking care with our remembering I'm going to turn this conversation over to the audience. I just want to preface it by saying that I don't think that amnesia is a particular condition, amnesia is a vastly generalisable condition. I'm quite struck, for instance, how little attention in the occidental world is paid to Giambattista Vico who also talked about a new science just as Ibn Khaldun did, and talked about these patterns and cycles. These are foundational for ways of thinking about history and about the transformation of time.

My point in drawing our attention to Ibn Khaldun is not necessarily to say that he says something particularly useful or specific about the Islamic world, but that, in a sense, he's a prime primus inter pares in all sorts of cultures where we can attempt to theorise moments of transition but not necessarily offer the answer to them. To read Ibn Khaldun for answers would be a kind of soothsaying, I think. We talk so much about divination and I think that's probably what it would be. But it might be interesting to read Ibn Khaldun for questions, and that's where I would leave room for more questions from our audience.

Shumon Basar: Hi. It's sometimes said that The Muqaddimah then went on to influence great western historians, German historians and historiography of the eighteenth century. Could you perhaps mention that, because I love this idea of having to keep remembering because we keep forgetting. It's obviously a cyclical thing, and this applies to many topics where, either by design or by default, authorship seems to be given to western enlightenment.

We can go back to the translation movement,. There are periods where, in the sense of survival, all of what we consider to be western civilisation or western epistemology going back to the Greeks, was in a sense elicited and made possible because of many Arab scholars - there's that migration and re-exportation back to the west. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the migration of The Muqaddimah and Ibn Khaldun back to western history and historiography. Who are some of the characters that taking him up, either positively or indeed negatively?

JD: There was a first supposed discovery of Ibn Khaldun by the western orientalists in the nineteenth century, and to them he was the rational scholar who could be used against the whole of Islamic culture through the colonial connection in order to underline the decline of these Islamic societies. Then came decolonisation; it was a great period for Ibn Khaldun in the 1960s and 70s, in France in particular. The leftists miners used to pay tribute to Ibn Khaldun because it was a way to recognise a kind of known genius of these theorisations.

There really was a consensus on this because at that time he had a great nationalist value.

I remember that in Tunis at the end of the 1970s there was a statue of Ibn Khaldun as a national symbol. It was very erratic statue, it was a kind of artistic language for the dictatorial regime. He was not on the good side of politics at the time, he was some kind of link to Europe and with western intellectuals. Today, it seems to me we have a kind of different vision of Ibn Khaldun, in western academic writers, he's not overwhelmingly made reference to, but he's seen as a kind of emblematic symbol of Islamic culture. We are in a more relativist world which is less universalist than it used to be a few decades ago, and there are more and more comparisons; Ibn Khaldun and Voltaire, Ibn Khaldun and Vico . He is the whole of Islamic culture. I don't know if I have answered the question.

JS: May I just quickly say I don't like the question. I don't like the question because it sets up what I think of as a relay race of civilisation. You have the Greeks, they are going strong, they have the baton to pass to the Arabs; the Arabs do really well for a couple of hundred metres and they hand it to the Europeans, and the Europeans win. That's kind of the relay race of civilisation which is all about the translation movement, handing things over, and what this does is it leads us to forgetting that things continue to happen in the Arab world after translation. When we're talking about translation, I'm talking about medieval translation, not the nineteenth century one but the handing over of the great translation movement of the eleventh and twelfth century which lead to all this knowledge coming into Europe before they started translating directly from Greek.

I think that here it would be worthwhile decentring Ibn Khaldun's European importance and really trying to recover his indigenous importance, and, in the process, helping the Arab world remember that they had an intellectual life which was vibrant, and which was happening before colonisation. This seems difficult to do because in most narratives of history nothing is really happening in the Arab world between roughly 1600-1800, then the French turn up. Then the French were great, and then the English turn up, and there's this response, and then you kick the French out. There's nothing happening before then, and everything becomes some kind of response; let's respond to colonisation, let's respond to this presence, let's go and take from them and do our own thing with it. That's how it has been.

Talk about amnesia, it's been forgotten that something was actually happening, something was going on in from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. I'm speaking broadly here, but that's where I think we need to focus. In this case, specifically Ibn Khaldun, let's focus on what was happening to him then – we have to move away from Europe, focus on what was happening in the Muslim world.

JD: Yes. I have to say that historiographically the question makes sense, and politically it makes sense, but as historians we are trying to find a new narrative, and what we should remember is that Ibn Khaldun knew about Europe. He talked about the Francs, it was not a foreign world to him, and there were plenty of Francs and European people in the ports of Morocco or Tunis. There were merchants, there were soldiers. It really was a very familiar reality for him, and he knew a lot about it. They were not separated worlds.

Q: I wonder if you could just elucidate a little bit more on this term that you used, the Naphthenes, and this idea of the neo-nomads and the migrants. You started to talk about this really interesting phrase of the fume of oil creating a fog of memory, and I wondered if you were connecting those two ideas, or if you could expand on that a little bit.

SS: Well, naphtha is a by-product of petroleum, it's like naphthalene, for instance, what you put in clothes to make sure that they don't get eaten up, for instance. I'm fascinated by the idea that we live in a world which is populated with by-products of petroleum. You can't have plastic without petroleum industries, the profusion of colour, for instance, that transforms our interior space, the fact that you have paints which are non-inflammable and can be used by non-specialist people. Polymers of all kinds are by-products of petroleum. There is a petroleum universe, and this petroleum universe is a particularly interesting one because it's predicated on the expenditure of what took a few million years to form, because all petroleum, all hydrocarbons, are the result of the fossils of micro-organisms that lived, that were actually life forms. When we dig for oil we're looking at the ghosts of prehistoric times, in a way.

The Naphthenes nomads is not my term, it's the term that Reza Negarestani uses and his is a particularly hallucinogenic take on history. I am inclined to thinking about Ibn Khaldun not as a rationalist but as a kind of theorist of dreams, a theorist of the imagination. He spends a lot of time talking about dreams. Reza Negarestani is a political dreamer, and I'm interested here in the tensions between what would not necessarily be recognised as Assabiya here, because there is an Assabiya here of, let's say, of the migrant population who actually built this place.

It was fascinating listening to an earlier panel where we were talking about how Dubai was built; it was built because lots of people came from different parts of the world to build these buildings, and they were also Naphthenes nomads, in a sense, because they had no stability. I think the future of this part of the world will see an interesting dynamic around the claims that the new Naphthenes nomads, the kind of twenty-first century Bedouins, will make on being able to be here. There are reflections of that already, I mean look at all the art in Art Dubai. It comes from the places where the Naphthenes nomads come from; not all of it but a lot of it comes from there.

I hear claims being made on the cultural vocabularies, the vocabularies of the imagination. These claims are not settled. They will not be settled without some amount of tension and conflict, but these inevitably will be claims made on the future of the state of law. We know Aristotle was an outsider in Athens. He came from the wild barbarian north to the settled civilised city of Athens. Someday there will be philosophers and writers and artists in Dubai who come from other places and they will theorise this place. Some of them are already here.

SB: Thank you. We have time for two more questions.

Q: Hi. My question is to the committee. How is there a sense of freedom, artistic freedom, in Islamic culture when there are a lot of taboo subjects that you cannot tackle, especially for female artists? In your opinion, is Islam, the religion and the culture, ready in the twenty-first century to actually break the barriers, despite there being certain subjects that are taboo to discuss? It's a yes or no answer.

JS: I suppose it's a non-question for me because for what you're positing this is going to be a deeply unsatisfying answer. You're positing that there's something called Islam that actually does things, that has an effect upon things, but there's not. There are Muslims, there are groups of Muslims at the moment. Much of what you're referring to is a conservative reaction to a postcolonial situation where the Muslim world has been controlled by outside forces for a long time, so there is a sensitivity to the representation of certain issues and there's a great deal of, in some ways, insecurity around certain cultural values that are perceived to be under threat. This comes to the fore sometimes with people feeling anxious about certain types of representation; the cartoon crisis would be a primary example of this. This has nothing to do with Islam as a system of thought or belief, this has to do with the specific cultural and political circumstances that Muslim populations have faced over the last couple of decades.

Q: My question addresses the lack of indigenous study or acknowledgement of the epistemologies of philosophical developments in the Islamic Arab world that the last scholar stated was missing, and the excessive focus on the 1400s. I'd like to know if you could fill us in on some of the critical Muslim developments that you think we should know about, or that should be at the forefront between the 1600s and the 1800s. I'd like to know more about that.

JS: For reasons of time I will be very brief, but there are two important historiographical shifts that we've seen. First of all, scholars now believe that logic, the study of logic, was vibrant and flourishing in the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, and that there were large numbers of Muslim scholars who were studying logic, going back and forth between the Maghreb and the Mashriq, who were talking about this. In the sources that I look at, I find people are being referred to as 'faylasoof', as philosophers, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an earlier paradigm would have made that impossible – that concept wouldn't have been available or used.

We find vibrant debates in terms of theology. We find, most interestingly perhaps, the rigid theological schools that we've been taught to associate with specific areas sort of blending into each other, doing things they're not supposed to do. Above all, in Iran and India we find philosophical notions of a type of peripatetic Greek philosophy being pushed forward under the rubric of theology. It's not as though philosophy ever disappears in the Muslim world as some people have portrayed it. I'm pointing to some of the basic trends that were moving towards a gradual revision of the intellectual history of the Muslim world during this time.

What we're not going to find, and I hope you stop trying to find, is a Muslim enlightenment, a Muslim mirroring of European history. Instead we're going to have to be content and learn to appreciate that an indigenous development does not play out according to a rubric that's set up by European history.

SB: Please join me in thanking Shuddha, Jocelyne and Justin for a fantastic talk.