OxBlog

# Posted 8:23 AM by Patrick Belton

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE HAVE A NAME! I think we may have received a winning suggestion for a name for our project to translate weekly selections from the English-language blogosphere into Arabic and Farsi. So our friends, please say hello to the Ibn Khaldun Project! For those of you who aren't familiar with his work, Ibn Khaldun was a brilliant and incisive fourteenth-century traveller and scholar, who translated the outside world and its political dynamics for an audience of his countrymen. His Kitab al-l'bar was a masterful rendition of the history of every empire and people known to medieval Islamic civilisation, and his ponderous Muqaddimah revolutionised medieval historiography by searching for economic, sociological, geographical, and psychological factors underlaying the rise, evolution, and decline of states - it has in many ways been judged the superior by scholars of the Italian Renaissance's Prince. So in naming our project the Ibn Khaldun Project, we are trying to live up to his legacy of bringing the Western and Middle Eastern worlds into productive dialogue with each other, and to make legible to audiences in the Middle East the varieties of opinion and political conversations to be found in the English-speaking world.

We've also gratefully got our first handful of volunteers - Arabic and Farsi speakers, as well as expert computer hands. We can always make use of the efforts of more, and we will look forward to making this project worthy of its namesake!

(SIDENOTE: It's also an acronym, incidentally - "I" stands for internet, and "bn Khaldun," well, we won't get into that for considerations of space....)

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