Ibn Khaldun

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khaldūn was born in Tunis in 1332 into a prominent family of Andalusian origin, which traced its descent to southern Arabia. The family had held administrative posts in Seville and left before the city was conquered by Castile in 1248. His father chose scholarship and religion over politics.

He received a classical education in the Qur'an, hadith, Maliki law, language and poetry, and with his teacher al-Ābilī also studied logic, philosophy and mathematics. During the Black Death (1348–1349) he lost his parents and some of his teachers; according to some scholars this shaped his later views on cities and society.

At twenty he began as seal-bearer at the Tunisian court, and he later served courts in Fez, Granada, Béjaïa and Tlemcen. His career consisted of changing roles as secretary, minister, envoy and intermediary with Berber tribes; he repeatedly fell from favour or was imprisoned, and he frequently changed rulers.

Between about 1375 and 1379 he withdrew to Qal'at Ibn Salama, where under the protection of a Berber tribe he wrote the first version of the Muqaddimah in 1377, the introduction to his world history, the Kitāb al-ʿIbar. He argued that reports should be tested for plausibility in light of how societies work, not only for the reliability of their transmitters.

In the fourteenth century the Maghreb and al-Andalus were politically fragmented: Marinids in Fez, Hafsids in Tunis, Abd al-Wadids in Tlemcen and Nasrids in Granada contended for territory and for the support of tribes. Shifting alliances help explain why senior officials such as Ibn Khaldun often changed employers.

The Black Death struck North Africa hard in 1348–1349 and disrupted cities, education and government. In Egypt, where he lived from 1382, an urban scholarly culture flourished under the Mamluks, while Timur's conquests threatened in the east. These circumstances are often seen as the context of his interest in the rise and decline of states.

In the Muqaddimah he distinguishes nomadic and settled societies. Central is ʿasabiyyah, the 'group feeling' or solidarity of a group; in his view it is strong among nomads and small kinship groups and can be reinforced by religion. A group can thereby conquer power, while urban life and luxury weaken that bond.

From this he derived a cycle: a dynasty arises on the edge of an empire, loses its solidarity over time and must give way to a new group. In his view a dynasty as a rule does not last longer than about three generations of roughly forty years. He presented this as a regularity illustrated with examples, mainly from the Maghreb, not as a fixed law.

Ibn Khaldun died in Cairo on 17 March 1406. Among contemporaries the Muqaddimah had limited influence: his pupil al-Maqrizi praised it, while scholars such as Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalānī criticised it for, among other things, insufficient historical knowledge and poor organisation. In Egypt he also met resistance to his efforts to reform the administration of justice.

In the seventeenth century Ottoman historians such as Kâtip Çelebi and Mustafa Naima used his ideas to interpret the rise and decline of empires. In Europe a biography appeared in d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale in 1697, and translations followed from the early nineteenth century. Labels such as 'founder of sociology' were conferred afterwards and remain debated.