Ibn Khaldūn in his Subjective Lexicon. The Emotional Constellation of an Intellectual in Transition

Abstract

This study is a linguistic analysis of the subjective lexicon used by the North African thinker ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) in the epilogue of his historical work Kitāb al-‘Ibar, known as Ta‘rīf, in which he writes a biography of himself. The pa- per outlines the usefulness of building an analytical schema of the linguistic phenomena in which the first person emerges, especially in self-referencing, actions, emotions, and eva- luations, in order to fully grasp the complexity of Ibn Khaldūn’s self-expression. A hybrid quantitative and qualitative methodology helps to extract, organize, analyze, and interpret his use of language to express himself in relation to the narration of his life’s journey and his psychological evolution. The data show an intimate expression of a premodern Arabic subject, leading Ta‘rīf to be considered an evolutionary link to the modern autobiography, which takes on great significance in the process of cultural transition of the Islamic West towards European modernity.