Ibn Khaldun invented context-bound interpretation to discipline corrupt texts

Evidence

His solution is to attempt to set down for the first time the grounds of interpretation, principles which are to govern the future reading of texts. The grounds are in the form of the essential ‘context’ or ‘circumstances’ (ahwal) of human social life. He offers in the Muqaddima an elaborate statement of the ordinary limits of human community, explaining the process in which communities are formed, grow, flourish and decay. These contextual limits are to circumscribe the possible interpretation of all written works, to keep the reading of history, given the corruption of texts and the normal ambiguity of writing, within the bounds of historical probability. His work was an enormous effort to provide the interpretive limits that would help to overcome the absence of authors of the past, and thus make it possible to imitate what was useful from the historical record. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 479

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Ibn Khaldun’s ahwal as a precursor to modern hermeneutic context — interpretive limits grounded in social circumstance.
• SEED: Possible essay: Ibn Khaldun as founder of contextual hermeneutics, centuries before Gadamer — the non-European genealogy of interpretation theory.
• DEEPTHINKING: The startling inversion: rather than repairing authorship through representation (the European solution Mitchell tracks), Khaldun bounds reading itself by the ordinary limits of human community — a genuinely different epistemic strategy.