ON IBN KHALDUN, MODERNISATION AND IMITATION / İBN HALDUN, MEDENİLEŞME VE TAKLİT ÜZERİNE

The emergence of civilisations is based on some necessary conditions. Communities can be said to have taken fundamental steps on the way of civilisation only after reaching the stages like scientific development, urbanisation, generation of novel artefacts in arts and aesthetics, and creating a community capable of all these. The attainment of all these conditions requires a long period spanning over centuries. There has always been a struggle among human societies throughout the history. Factors such as military, scientific-technological superiority and morale strength of people are among the factors that play crucial roles in winning that struggle. To obtain a real achievement the combination of other geographical and social factors proves to be supportive. Ibn Khaldun argues that nations losing the struggle, disregardful of these factors, have the misconception that they should imitate the winners in terms of their manner of dressing and things they use in daily life to keep up with their level of civilisation. He thinks that it is not possible by doing so to become as powerful as the superior winning nations or attain the capacity to win a victory. In other words, imitating the superior nations' manners is not the right way to achieve that. Moreover, communities imitating nations that they consider as superior also have the risk of alienation from their core values and losing their national identities. Lagging behind in many fields especially in science and technology compared to the Western civilisation and searching for means to keep up with the superiority of the West, other nations today try to do so by means of imitation as was pointed out by Ibn Khaldun. As a result, the whole world is exposed to the invasion of the Western culture and civilisation either willingly or unwillingly. As such the Western civilisation has pervaded through every bit of other civilisations of the world and begun to dominate over all areas of life. In other words, the values of the Western civilisation have been indisputably imposed with the result that people have become surprisingly eager to adopt them. Many intellectuals from various parts of the world severely critize the adoption and acceptance as a last resort of the Western values which have forced its way through other civilisations especially over the recent centuries. The present study is built around a criticism of this imitation/adoption.