Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun, full name Abu Zayd Abd-Ar-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the greatest of the medieval Islamic historians.

Born on May 27, 1332, in Tunis (now in Tunisia), of a Spanish-Arab family, Ibn Khaldun held court positions in what are today Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, and in Granada, Spain, and was twice imprisoned. In 1375 he went into seclusion near modern Frenda, Algeria, taking four years to compose his monumental Muqaddamah, the introductory volume to his Kitab al-Ibar (Universal History). In 1382, on pilgrimage to Mecca, he was offered a chair at the famous Islamic university of Al Azhar by the sultan of Cairo, who also appointed him judge (qadi) of the Maliki rite of Islam. In 1400 he accompanied the sultan's successor to Damascus in an expedition to resist the invasion of the Turkic ruler Tamerlane. Ibn Khaldun spent several weeks as Tamerlane's honored guest before returning to Cairo, where he died on March 17, 1406.

The Kitab al-Ibar is a valuable guide to the history of Muslim North Africa and the Berbers. Its six history volumes, however, are overshadowed by the immense significance of the Muqaddamah. In it, Ibn Khaldun outlined a philosophy of history and theory of society that are unprecedented in ancient and medieval writing and that are closely reflected in modern sociology. Societies, he believed, are held together by the power of social cohesiveness, which can be augmented by the unifying force of religion. Social change and the rise and fall of societies follow laws that can be empirically discovered and that reflect climate and economic activity as well as other realities.