İbn Haldûn’un Habitusu’na İbn Haldûncu Bir Ziyaret: Et-Ta‘rîf’teki Sosyal, Siyasî ve Fikrî Koşullar

If Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of “man is the child of his habits” is restated into a single concept, most probably the strongest candidate for it will be habitus. Habitus is a concept used by Pierre Bourdieu to describe the sum of the social, political, intellectual and economic backgrounds involved in the existence of the subject, which transforms into a certain disposition in practical relations. This comprehension largely overlaps with Ibn Khaldūn’s understanding of the habits of the subject in a relational context as the established unity of historical dispositions that pass through the habits of the subject but both overcome and precede them. To put it more briefly, the common point of these viewpoints is that they take into account the object share in the subject and the subject share in the object. However, the part that this view would especially like to emphasize by means of this consept and theory is the object share in the subject. Then, what is the object share of Ibn Khaldūn’s own dispositions as a thinker with such understanding? To what extent are functional the relations between subject share and object share in Ibn Khaldūn’s practical and theoretical dispositions? In order to find an answer to these questions, especially the first, this essay investigates how much of Ibn Khaldūn’s dispositions are embedded in the social, political, and intellectual contexts to which he belongs. However, as a more secondary concern, the essay attempts to provide an answer to the second question as well. In this way, on the one hand, the article aims to reveal the traces of these conditions in Ibn Khaldūn’s habits or habitus through the knowledge given by himself in alTa‘rîf, and on the other, it aims to make visible the relationship between his predispositions and theories developed in The Muqaddimah such as mulk, asabiyyah, lineage and generations.