Ibn Khaldun held that written words inherently drift and require interpretive reading.

Evidence

Ibn Khaldun wrote in a period of political crisis in the Arab world, as I mentioned, which was also a period of crisis in the problem of authorial absence. This relationship between political weakness and the weaknesses of written scholarship was no coincidence for Ibn Khaldun. He addressed one in terms of the other. The connection is evoked even in the title of his work, the ‘Book of ibar’. As Muhsin Mahdi has shown, the term ibar is ambiguous, both referring to and illustrating the ambiguity of language. The word can mean the ‘lessons’ to be learnt from historical texts, but in a wider sense suggests both the expression of meaning and its concealment. The fuller title continues this link between writing and history, for the work is further entitled ‘the record of the subject and the predicate’ in the history of the Arabs and others. The first sixty or seventy pages of the text are then concerned with the problem of writing, showing how texts are corrupted and misread, how the techniques of discipleship have broken down and the chains of authority have been severed. The purpose of the work is to bring a remedy to the political crisis by overcoming this breakdown in writing. The remedy Ibn Khaldun offers is entirely new. It stands out from the fourteenth century as a unique attempt to overcome the essential weaknesses of writing. But the remedy is not that of a theory of representation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 478 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ibn Khaldun invented context-bound interpretation to discipline corrupt texts — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 479; Ibn Khaldun linked Arab political decline to a crisis of textual authorship — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 478; Pre-print Arab scholars saw written meaning as inherently unstable, not mechanically transparent. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 472

Broader Connections

• Ibn Khaldun linked Arab political decline to a crisis of textual authorship #complicates (0.72) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 478