Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah, which invented something close to sociology four centuries before anyone else attempted it, and he wrote it in a castle in Algeria while hiding from politics. He was born in Tunis to an Andalusian family that had left Seville, and the Black Death took both his parents and most of his teachers when he was seventeen. He then spent twenty-five years in the service of one North African court after another - Fez, Granada, Bougie, Tlemcen - as secretary, chamberlain and envoy, changing sides, being imprisoned, and acquiring a low opinion of dynasties that he later turned into a theory. The Muqaddimah, written in 1377 as the introduction to a universal history, argues that states rise and fall on a cycle of roughly four generations, driven by asabiyyah - group feeling, the solidarity that lets a people act as one. Hard conditions produce it, conquest follows, and the luxury of settled rule dissolves it, at which point a hungrier group from the margin arrives. He treated history as a discipline with rules of evidence, dismissing chroniclers who repeated implausible numbers, and he wrote about economics, taxation and the division of labour in terms Adam Smith would have recognised. He ended his career as a Maliki judge in Cairo, and in 1400 was lowered over the wall of besieged Damascus in a basket to negotiate with Tamerlane, who questioned him for weeks about North Africa. He wrote an autobiography, which is unusual for the period and is most of what is known about him. The Muqaddimah was barely read outside Ottoman circles until the nineteenth century, when European orientalists found it and were startled. Arnold Toynbee called it the greatest work of its kind ever created. His grave in Cairo has been lost.

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