Islamic History and Literature

This article proposes a rethinking of intelligence based on worlds of intelligibility in which objects, relations, and transformations become thinkable. It begins with an observation in Ibn Khaldun: the difference between the Muqaddimah, produced in a context of documentary withdrawal, and the historical volumes of the Kitāb al-Ibar invites us to consider the book and the library not as mere repositories of information, but as cognitive infrastructures that configure the conditions for the production of knowledge. This perspective leads to a distinction between two ideal-typical regimes of intelligibility: starting from relations to bring forth structures and objects, or starting from objects to classify and interpret them. The analysis is then extended to the relational conception of meaning in Ibn Jinnī and al-Jurjānī, and subsequently to the notions of the invisible in Merleau-Ponty and the historical conditions of knowledge in Foucault. Language, classification, institutions, archives, and technologies thus appear as historically constituted infrastructures that determine not only what can be seen, named, and thought, but also what can remain invisible, unnamed, and unthought. The shift from the library to the algorithm reveals a qualitative transformation: the algorithm becomes a dynamic cognitive infrastructure capable of selecting, classifying, linking, predicting, and generating. Its black-box dimension then raises a question of power. Finally, the article examines the mathematics of manifolds, categories, and topoi as avenues that could open up new worlds of intelligibility, beyond the cognitive infrastructures of the book and contemporary architectures of artificial intelligence. This perspective shows that the boundaries between history, literature, mathematics, and IT are not necessarily impermeable: they can be rethought as spaces of passage, dialogue, and mutual transformation