Ibn Khaldun
(Wali al-Din Abd ar-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Abi Bakr Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan Ibn Khladun)

Arab historian, b. 27 May 1332 (Tunis), d. 17 March 1406 (Cairo).

The life of Ibn Khaldun is known in great detail from his autobiography. It reports that the Khalduns were originally from South Arabia but had moved to Spain with the Muslim conquest. From the 9th century the family had served the rulers of Seville in various high positions. In 1248, when the fall of Seville to Christian forces became imminent, the Khalduns had moved to Morocco and were soon given high administrative posts in Tunis. The house were Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332 can still be seen in the city's ancient Khalduniyah quarter.

Ibn Khaldun was 17 years old and had not completed his formal education when his parents died during an outbreak of the plague. Three years later, when he was given his first post at the court of Tunis, he had memorized the Qur'an, studied all major commentaries, mastered most of Muslim law, knew the major literary works and was able to write poetry in clear and expressive style. According to his own account his formal education did not include much philosophy, history or geography, fields in which he later excelled.

Ibn Khaldun's career as a servant of governments was characterized by ups and downs in quick succession. The empire that controlled all of northern Africa and Muslim Spain was in the process of breaking up, which made government service a dangerous occupation under any circumstances. Ibn Khaldun's uncompromising temper did not help and made him many enemies. Service as peace negotiator, leader of military expeditions, prime minister and other appointments was regularly interrupted by time in prison, flight from arrest and change of employer.

In 1375 Ibn Khaldun decided to turn away from this exhausting life and placed himself under the protection of the tribe of Awlad 'Arif, who accommodated him with his family in his castle Qal'at ibn Salamah near todayÕs Frenda in Algier. For four years Ibn Khaldun concentrated on writing the first parts of his Muqaddimah and his history of Muslim North Africa Kitab al-'ibar. Realizing that he needed access to libraries to complete his work, he obtained permission to return to Tunis and in 1382 to travel to Egypt, giving as his reason the need to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. But on his arrival in Cairo, then the centre of Muslim scholarship, he was immediately asked to teach at the al-Azhar university, became a professor at the Quamhiyah college and was appointed chief judge of the Maliki rite of Sunni Islam.

But the old cycle of falling into disfavour, changing employer and being offered another high post was soon operational again, and Ibn Khaldun was again on the move. When Timur arrived at the walls of Damascus in 1401 Ibn Khaldun found himself inside the besieged city. Timur asked to meet the famous scholar, and Ibn Khaldun was lowered in a casket from the city walls and stayed in Timur's camp for seven weeks. On Timur's request he wrote a description of North Africa, which gained him even greater respect, and he was able to negotiate the safe conduct for the civilian employees of Damascus when the city was sacked. He left the ruined city to return to Cairo, where he spent the last few years of his life.

Ibn Khaldun's significance in the history of civilizations is his masterpiece the Muqaddimah. Designed as a philosophy of history, it constitutes a complete system of the social sciences, based on a totally new approach to the nature of human societies and the processes that determine their change. Ibn Khaldun called it 'ilm al-'umran or the "science of culture". The six books of the work present

The underlying principle of his analysis was the concept of 'asabiyah or "social cohesion", which develops from tribal structures and grows into the complex structures of cities and states. While Ibn Khaldun regards history as a cycle of growth, flowering and decay and sees evolution or progress only in its most elementary forms during the fermentation of new cohesive structures, he recognizes ruptures and breaking points in history and saw his own times as one of them.

Ibn Khaldun was a genius of immense originality of thought. Being much ahead of his time, his impact on sociology and the history of science remained modest. A partial translation of the Muqaddimah. into Turkish appeared in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th century, but it was not until after the 1860s that a complete translation into French made Ibn Khaldun's work accessible to modern scholars. Some 100 years later the English historian Arnold Toynbee described the Muqaddimah. as "a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time and place."

Statue of Ibn Khaldun in Tunis.

Portrait: Tunisian postage stamp; public domain
Photo: check the copyright status.

Reference

Issawi, C.: Ibn Khaldun, Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed. (1995)

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