Ibn Khaldun

Who is Ibn Khaldun?

Ibn Khaldun (full name Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun) was born in Tunis in 1332 into a family of Andalusian origin that had settled in Ifriqiya, the medieval region now largely corresponding to Tunisia. He served in a series of political and diplomatic posts across North Africa and Muslim Spain amid the turbulent court politics of the 14th-century Maghreb, before withdrawing to a castle in what is now Algeria, where he composed his masterwork, the Muqaddimah ("Introduction"), the prolegomenon to his universal history Kitab al-Ibar. In the Muqaddimah he developed pioneering theories of social cohesion (asabiyyah), the cyclical rise and decline of dynasties, economics, and historiographical method, work that later scholars such as Arnold Toynbee credited as founding the fields of sociology and the philosophy of history centuries before those disciplines were formally named in Europe. He later moved to Cairo, where he taught, served as a Maliki judge, and even met the conqueror Timur outside the besieged city of Damascus in 1401. He died in Cairo in 1406 and is regarded as one of the greatest minds of the medieval Islamic world.

Sources: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (Rosenthal translation, 1958) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ibn Khaldun" · Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (2018)