Islam’s most admired historian, ‘Abd-ar-Rahm¯ an
Ab¯ u Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad
ibn Khald¯ un—generally known simply as Ibn
Khald¯ un—is chiefly remembered as the author
of the MUQADDIMAH (literally, “Introduction,”
namely to a work of universal history). But Ibn
Khald¯ un’s life was politically active as well as contemplative and intellectual.
Born to a family of politically influential scholars and scribes in the North African city of Tunis,
Ibn Khald¯ un received an extensive early education
in the KORAN, in Arabic, in Muslim law, and in the
sciences of mathematics and logic as well as philosophy (particularly the Islamic Aristotelians). He
later studied Arab mysticism (Sufi). Thus Ibn
Khald¯ un was trained to take the position of a court
scribe, in the tradition of his family. The BLACK
DEATH of 1349 killed his parents and many of his
teachers, and the young Ibn Khald¯ un soon left
Tunis for the position of scribe at the court of Fez,
the center of political power of the Merinid dynasty in North Africa at the time. But Ibn Khald¯ un
was restless and temperamental, and he moved
restlessly from court to court, always seeking more
influence. In 1362 he was in the court of Muhammad V in Granada, and in 1365 he was appointed
hajib (the head of the government) in the Hafsid
city of Bougie, though his career was in ruins after
the emir of Constantine occupied Bougie the following year, sending Ibn Khald¯ un into a decade of
minor appointments and uncertainty.
By 1375, Ibn Khald¯ un was worn out by his political career and by the constant strife between the
Merinid and Hafsid dynasties of northwest Africa,
and he retired to the fortress village of Qal’at Ibn
Sal¯ amah in what is now Algeria, where, in seclusion between 1375 and 1379, he began what was
to be a history of the Arabs and the Berber people,
but which developed into a new philosophy of history, his Muqaddimah. In it, he argues that the laws
of God can be demonstrated to be the foundation
of the good society, both economically and socially. The state is established to defend the community against aggression and violence from
within and without, to protect private property, to
prevent fraud and theft, and to protect the currency. But more generally, his study of history led
him to postulate that empires rise and fall according to a three-stage pattern, during the first stage of
which empires are established because human beings seek civilization and its economic and cultural
benefits as a good. But in the second stage, the dynasty inevitably becomes corrupt and exploits its
citizens, the state weakens, and, in the third stage, a
new and vital society overthrows them and creates
a new empire.
Perhaps it was the perspective given him by his
study of history that reinvigorated Ibn Khald¯ un to
reenter public life. In 1384 he accepted an appointment as a judge in Cairo, where he was also appointed an instructor in Islamic law at the
Qamhîyah College. From that point until his death
in 1406, Ibn Khald¯ un was (off and on) chief judge
at the Malikite school of law, and at times administrator of Sufi institutions in Egypt. He continued
his interest in historical scholarship and in Islamic
law and its application in everyday life.
Aside from his Muqaddimah, Ibn Khald¯ un is
known for his History of the Berbers, our chief
source of information about the history of North
Africa and the Berber people during this turbulent period. Some of his earlier works made him
famous in his own time even as a young man:
philosophical treatises on logic, on arithmetic, and
on law; a commentary on a well-known poem in
praise of Muhammad called the Burda, and a summary of the work of AVERROËS. He also met with
the famous Tatar conqueror Tamerlane in 1400,
and left an important historical account of that
meeting. But the wide-ranging social, economic,
and historical philosophy of his Muqaddimah has
ensured Ibn Khald¯ un his own place in the history
of civilization.
Bibliography
Al-Azmeh, Aziz. Ibn Khaldûn: An Essay in Reinterpretation. London: Routledge, 1990.
Baali, Fuad. Social Institutions: Ibn Khaldûn’s Social
Thought. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992.
Ibn Khaldûn. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to
History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, abridged
and edited by N. J. Dawood, with a new introduction by Bruce B. Lawrence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Mahdi, Muhsin. Ibn Khaldûn’s Philosophy of History: A
Study in the Philosophic Foundation of the Science of
Culture. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1957.