Ibn Khaldūn (27 May 1332 – 17 March 1406, 732–808 AH) was an Arab The Historical Muhammad, Irving M. Zeitlin, (Polity Press, 2007), p. 21; "It is, of course, Ibn Khaldun as an Arab here speaking, for he claims Arab descent through the male line.". The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State, Halim Barakat (University of California Press, 1993), p. 48;"The renowned Arab sociologist-historian Ibn Khaldun first interpreted Arab history in terms of badu versus hadar conflicts and struggles for power." Ibn Khaldun, M. Talbi, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. III, ed. B. Lewis, V.L. Menage, C. Pellat, J. Schacht, (Brill, 1986), 825; "Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis, on I Ramadan 732/27 May 1332, in an Arab family which came originally from the Hadramawt and had been settled at Seville since the beginning of the Muslim conquest...." Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophic Foundation of the Science of Culture, Muhsin Mahdi, Routledge; "His family claimed descent from a Yemenite tribe originating in Hadramawt" Issawi, Charles. "Ibn Khaldūn". Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 March 2021; "the greatest Arab historian", "the family claimed descent from Khaldūn, who was of South Arabian stock, and had come to Spain in the early years of the Arab conquest and settled in Carmona." Cheddadi, Abdesselam, “Ibn Khaldūn, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE; "was one of the greatest Arab historians, a philosopher, and a sociologist." Tunisian scholar, historian, philosopher, and sociologist.Cheddadi, Abdesselam (auth). He is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages,Bernard Lewis: "Ibn Khaldun in Turkey", in: Ibn Khaldun: The Mediterranean in the 14th Century: Rise and Fall of Empires, Foundation El Legado Andalusí, 2006, , pp. 376–380 (376) S.M. Deen (2007) Science under Islam: rise, decline and revival. p. 157. and is considered by a number of scholars to be a major forerunner of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography studies.
Joseph J. Spengler (1964). "Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6(3), pp. 268–306.
His best-known book is the Muqaddimah or Prolegomena ("Introduction"), which he wrote in six months as he states in his autobiography.Ali Zaidi, Islam, Modernity, and the Human Sciences, Springer, 2011, p. 84 It later influenced 17th-century and 19th-century Ottoman historians such as Kâtip Çelebi, Mustafa Naima and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who used its theories to analyze the growth and decline of the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Khaldun interacted with Tamerlane, the founder of the Timurid Empire.
He has been called one of the most prominent Muslim and Arab scholars and historians. Recently, Ibn Khaldun's works have been compared with those of influential European philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte as well as the economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith, suggesting that their ideas found precedent (although not direct influence) in his. He has also been influential on certain modern Islamic thinkers (e.g. those of the traditionalist school).
Early life Ibn Khaldun's life is well-documented as a result of his biography. However, despite it being described by the historian Allen Fromherz as "the most detailed autobiography in Medieval Muslim literature", it lacked many personal details.
Both the scholars Walter Joseph Fischel and Syed Farid Alatas divided Ibn Khaldun's life into phases with the former dividing it into two and the latter into three. Fischel divides his life into the period he lived in the Maghreb (birth to fifty years) and the period he lived in Egypt. Alatas divides it into the first twenty years covering his education, the next twenty years in political office and the final twenty where he served as a scholar, teacher and magistrate.
Birth and family
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khaldūn was born in Tunis on 26 May 1332 (1 Ramadan 732 AH) into an upper-class Andalusian family of Yemeni Arab descent, the Banū Khaldūn. He traced family's ancestry to Ḥaḍramawt with his lineage specifically going back to Wāʾil Ibn Hujr a companion of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and a prominent chief:
In a delegation to Madina visiting the prophet, Wāʾil received a blessing from the Prophet: "O Allah, bless Wa'il and his descendants!". He narrated about seventy hadiths and was also a close companion of the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya. The specific tribe Ibn Khaldun traced his ancestry to was Kinda. The eponymous ancestor of the Banū Khaldūn was ʿUthmān ibn Bakr ibn Khālid, also known as Khaldūn, who originally settled in Carmona then in Seville.
Both Ibn Ḥazm and Ibn Ḥayyān mentioned the Banū Khaldūn as one of the most important Arab families in al-Andalus occupying prominent governmental and scholarly positions in Seville. However, during the first three centuries of Muslim rule, there is little information about the Banū Khaldūn. At the start of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd Allāh's reign in the 9th century, the Banū Khaldūn alongside the Banū l-Ḥajjāj were the leading Arab families of Seville. One of Ibn Khaldun's ancestors, Kurayb, led a revolt at that time and established a quasi-independent state in Seville. In the taifa period, the Banū Khaldūn served as viziers under the Abbadid dynasty. Under the Almohads, the Banū Khaldūn reappeared as members of the Sevillan ellite and they had ties with the Almohad governors. Ibn Khaldun was linked to the Hafsids on his maternal side as one of his maternal ancestors, Ibn al-Muhtasib, gave a Galician concubine to the Hafsid Abū Zakariyyāʾ. A descendant of this relationship was the Hafsid ruler in Tunis.
The Banū Khaldūn left Seville in 1232 before the Reconquista and the city's occupation in 1248. They first settled in the city of Ceuta before moving to Tunis. The fourth-grandfather of Ibn Khaldun, al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad, joined Abū Zakariyyāʾ in Bona. Ibn Khaldun's great grandfather, Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan, served as Director of Finances (ʿamal al-ashgāl) to Abū Isḥāq. However, he died during an anti-Hafsid revolt by the pretender who arrested, tortured and executed Abū Bakr Muḥammad. Ibn Khaldun's grandfather, Muḥammad, was initially named Chamberlain to the Crown Prince, Abū Fāris, under Abū Isḥāq. After Abū Yaḥyā ibn al-Liḥyānī conquered Tunis, Muḥammad was appointed chamberlain. Abū Yaḥyā would often leave the affairs of state under Muḥammad's administration. Muḥammad held a number of minor positions under multiple Hafsid rulers but avoided higher appointments (potentially because of the fate of his father). After two pilgrimages to Mecca, he retired to become a religious scholar. He died in 1337. Ibn Khaldun's father, Muḥammad Abū Bakr, broke from the familial tradition and stayed out of politics.. "There was one important break in this chain of statesmen: his father. Ibn Khaldun described how his own father, Muhammad Abu Bakr, unlike any of his previous ancestors, abandoned the life of the statesman and the warrior: ‘My father left a career of arms and service to princes and devoted himself to religious sciences and the life of a recluse.’" He devoted himself to fiqh, literature and piety. Ibn Khaldun had a younger brother, Yaḥyā, who was also a scholar and historian, and an older brother, Muḥammad, who there is little information about.
The Black Death (or simply the plague) was a major turning point during Ibn Khaldun's youth in which he lost close family members including both his mother and father and much of his extended family. The scholars Douglas H. Garrison and Allen Fromherz argue that the plague impacted Ibn Khaldun's worldview on public sanitation, urban life and urbanisation as well as inspiring him to write the Muqaddimah.
Education
Ibn Khaldun's first and most influential teacher was his father. Under his father's tutelage, he studied both the Islamic and the rational sciences with his father also shaping his independent thinking and appreciation for Sufism. Coming from an erudite and socially prominent family, he studied a standard curriculum which qualified him for either scholarly or administrative professions.
He also benefitted from a number of other teachers which encompassed locally prominent Moroccan and Tunisian scholars along with Andalusian exiles who had settled in Tunis and other North African cities. Ibn Khaldun learnt a number of Islamic sciences including Quranic recitation and its different styles, Quranic orthography, Maliki law, the hadiths and poetry. Under his father and several grammarians and literary scholars he studied Arabic. With the Andalusian scholar Abu ʿAbdallah Muhammad al- Ansari, he studied the Quran and fiqh. At a young age, he became a hafiz. The specific style of recitation he learnt was the Yaʿqub recitation. He would also go on to memorise volumes of poetry, literature, and hadith. He received an ijāza to transmit teachings in language and law from the leading hadith scholar in Tunis, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sulṭān al-Qaysī al-Wādīyāshī. He also received an ijaza from a number of other scholars. Ibn Khaldun studied Maliki law under a number of scholars with Ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Jayyānī teaching him the entire Kitāb al-Muwaṭṭaʾ the basis of Maliki law.
During the Marinid occupation of Ifriqya under the ruler Abu al-Hasan, Ibn Khaldun was able to access a number of scholars from the western Maghrib. This included who would become his most prominent teacher, Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ābilī, described by Ibn Khaldun as "the grand master of the rational sciences". Under al-Ābilī, he studied philosophy, logic and mathematics. al-Ābilī was a rationalist and was highly influenced by Greco-Islamic thought namely that of al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. At the age of 19, under al-Ābilī, Ibn Khaldun completed an abridgement of al-Razi's Lubab al-Muhassal. Through al-Ābilī, Ibn Khaldun developed his opposition to madrasas which were typically used by the state to disseminate their own views. Not being restricted to specific institutions and having access to many teachers allowed Ibn Khaldun to have a very diverse education giving him freedom to study under any teacher who would take him.
The plague would kill many of his teachers. It also killed many of Abu al-Hasan's retinue and army with his remaining followers retreating back towards Fes. Eventually, al-Ābilī would also return to Fes.
Political career
At the age of 20, he began his political career in the chancellery of the Tunisian ruler Ibn Tafrakin with the position of Kātib al-'Alāmah (seal-bearer), which consisted of writing in fine calligraphy the typical introductory notes of official documents. In 1352, Abū Ziad, the sultan of Constantine, marched on Tunis and defeated it. Ibn Khaldūn, in any case unhappy with his respected but politically meaningless position, followed his teacher Abili to Fez. There, the Marinid sultan, Abū Inan Fares I, appointed him as a writer of royal proclamations, but Ibn Khaldūn still schemed against his employer, which, in 1357, got the 25-year-old a 22-month prison sentence. Upon the death of Abū Inan in 1358, Vizier al-Hasān ibn-Umar granted him freedom and reinstated him to his rank and offices. Ibn Khaldūn then schemed against Abū Inan's successor, Abū Salem Ibrahim III, with Abū Salem's exiled uncle, Abū Salem. When Abū Salem came to power, he gave Ibn Khaldūn a ministerial position, the first position to correspond with Ibn Khaldūn's ambitions.
Al-Sakhāwī summarizes his career as including travel through major western Islamic centers such as Fez, Granada, and Tlemcen, alongside repeated shifts between political roles. The same entry notes that he later arrived in Cairo in Shaʿbān 782 AH/1380 CE.