Alparslan Episode 50 English Subtitles Full Episode

History of the Seluk Empire

This is part 2 of Alparslan Empire History, read part 1 in episode 49.

The need to mention the old argument is because this paper views the history of the Great Seljuk Empire from the perspective of the cyclical theory of social change. The literature used to understand the rise and fall of the Seljuk Empire is from the domain of ‘history,’ while the literature on the cyclical theory of social change is from ‘sociology.’ Hence this paper has two main objectives.

The first is to analyze and compare the theories of two cyclical theorists of social change namely Ibn Khaldun and Vilfredo Pareto. The reason these two theorists are taken for comparison is that one of them is a Medieval thinker and the other is a contemporary thinker (in terms of the period). Besides, both Ibn Khaldun and Vilfredo Pareto’s ideas discussed the political factors that lead to the rise and fall of the civilization, or cyclical nature of society. The second is to analyze the history of the Seljuk Empire regarding its rise and decline. The political history of the Seljuk Empire is viewed and analyzed by considering the cyclical theories propounded by Khaldun and Pareto.

Vilfredo Pareto, our second thinker, was an Italian born in Paris in 1848 to an Italian political family (see David & Orenstien, 2012, pp. 321-334). He was trained to be an engineer, but his works are more famously recognized in economics first and sociology after it. The political influence of his family and the environment he grew up in is reflected in his works. Pareto’s first sociological work was published in 1901, The Rise and Fall of Elites, and later, translated into English by Hans Zetterberg in 1968.

In this work, Pareto sought to identify the major features of society that fluctuate cyclically, to describe the movements of the societies in equilibrium terms, and to indicate ways in which the structural features and the general forms of society emerge from the equilibrium (Powers, 1987). Pareto’s main work that explains his theory of the circulation of elites is mentioned in detail in his work Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916), which was later translated into English in 1935 in two volumes. In Trattato di Sociologia Generale, Pareto describes in detail his concepts of ‘residues’ and derivates’ which will help us to understand his theory on the circulation of elites in society (Powers, 1987).

Background

Biographical sketch of the theorists

Ibn Khaldun was a North African scholar that lived in the 14th century. He was of Arab descent, born in Tunisia. However, his family had come to Spain during the early spread of Islam (Akhmetova, 2013). He belonged to the scholarly families of Seville. Ibn Khaldun lived during a very troubled period when the Arab Muslim’s rule in Andalusia was challenged more than before. His book, the Muqaddimah, was hugely influential and seminal because he was the first historian who took the scientific approach to history (Khaldun, 2015).

Before him, historians usually tended to be normative. They would talk about history as drawing parables for moral guidance whereas he analyzed history scientifically and has been called the father of sociology, father of economics as his approach to history spun a whole set of social sciences (Khaldun, 2015). Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah was first published in 1370 CE in Arabic. It was translated into English by Franz Rosenthal in 1958 in three volumes which were
later abridged into one version in 196