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Both Confucius and Ibn Khaldun were scholars of a pre-modern world and as such their ideas reflected in part their own times. Judging from a safe historical distance one can easily dismiss their contributions as being patriarchal, staunchly elitist, overly moralist, or state-centric. However, this type of criticism would be ahistorical in a sense that it would apply contemporary moral yardsticks to the ancient past. A much more beneficial form of critique would be to assess how sociologically adequate are the concepts and ideas developed by Confucius and Ibn Khaldun. In other words, can we still deploy some of these ideas to understand the social world? In this light it seems that Ibn Khaldun has to offer more than Confucius. While Confucius provides some insightful analyses on the social origins of virtuous behaviour and on the role of self-discipline in the development of society-wide civility, much of his work is deeply prescriptive rather than analytical.

One could argue that Confucius makes a significant sociological contribution in a sense that he traces some specific social processes such as the moral capacities of social orders through time, or the way he identifies particular social types such as the sage or the gentlemen. However, as his focus is almost exclusively on moral guidance rather than on explanation, his contribution never reaches the level of a fully fledged sociological analysis. For example, when he explores the role of rituals in social life his focus is not on how ritualism contributes to social cohesion as such, but rather on what the performance of rituals does to one’s own moral cultivation. These issues are clearly addressed in his statements that emphasise continuous ethical self-development: ‘Ask yourself constantly, What is the right thing to do?’; ‘those who are firm, enduring, simple and unpretentious are the nearest to virtue’; Or ‘to practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue: these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness’. While these moral prescriptions have enduring moral value, they do not offer sociological tools to understand how the social world works.

Moreover, Confucius’s overemphasis on the role of individual responsibility and the lack of engagement with the social structure has generated a great deal of criticism. Hence South Korean scholar Kyong-il has been particularly critical of the Confucian notion of filial piety. This concept, which stands for the virtue of respect for one’s fathers, elders and ancestors, has been described as deeply conservative and hierarchical and in this sense poses an obstacle to social change (Sun Lim & Soriano, 2016; Riegel, 2013).

Although Ibn Khaldun provides a sociologically more robust conceptual apparatus, he too was not immune to critical assessments. There are three types of criticism levelled against his approach. Firstly, some scholars have focused on his epistemological and methodological contributions. Here the central issue is a deep tension between rationalism and mysticism that characterises his main work, The Muqaddimah, and is also present in his other publications. Ibn Khaldun’s rationalism is notable in his approach to the social development of cities, his analyses of state formation, dynastic rises and falls, and the broader civilisational changes as well as his studies of group solidarity. However, this rationalist approach that centres on causal relationships is often countered by regular bouts of mysticism that fill many pages of his work. For example, in The Muqaddimah he criticises the hagiographic and myth-making-oriented historical scholarship by emphasising the centrality of ‘the factual proofs and circumstantial evidence’ (2005: 23) while denouncing logic as a mechanism to understand the origins of social relations: ‘The philosophers say that happiness consists in coming to perceive existence as it is, by means of logical arguments. This is a fraudulent statement that must be rejected’ (2005: 402). Some scholars argue that Ibn Khaldun cannot resolve the inherent tension between faith and reason, while others criticise his nominalism, which does not allow for an explanation of the particular from the general (Alatas, 2014: 161; Brett, 1972).

Secondly, Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of history has been challenged by much of post-Enlightenment social science that subscribes to more linear models of social change. The theories of social cycles in history have been popular over the centuries and have been recently revived with the development of new mathematical models of socio-demographic cycles (Turchin, 2010; Turchin & Hall 2003). Nevertheless, most pre-Enlightenment cyclical models do not make room for the theory of evolution and as such cannot account for a substantial degree of biological linearity that underpins more recent cyclical models of history.

Thirdly, and sociologically most importantly, Ibn Khaldun’s theories of social change have been criticised as insufficient to explain the complexity of social relations outside of the Maghreb and the pre-modern Islamic world. For example, Gellner (1981: 88–9) argues that Khaldunian theoretical models are excellent but only applicable to a specific time and place: Ibn Khaldun ‘was the sociologist of Islam; notably of Islam as manifested in the arid zone, an environment which encourages tribalism by favouring nomadic or semi-nomadic pastorialism and which hinders centralising political tendencies’. In this context his theory of group solidarity is perceived to be valid for what Durkheim called ‘mechanical solidarity’ of small pre-modern groups but not adequate to account for the multifaceted nature of ‘organic solidarity’ that develops in the industrialised era. Some have also questioned the psychological postulates of Khaldunian arguments (Ritter, 1948). However other scholars have argued that although Ibn Khaldun could not envisage the emergence of modernity, his micro-sociology is still relevant and helps us understand micro-group dynamics in the modern world (Malešević, 2015; Alatas, 2014).