Ibn Khaldun

. Ibn Khaldun's life is relatively well-documented, as he wrote an autobiography (, ''; Presenting Ibn Khaldun and his Journey West and East'') in which numerous documents regarding his life are quoted word-for-word. Abū Zayd 'Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami, generally known as "Ibn Khaldūn" after a remote ancestor, was born in Tunis in AD 1332 (732 AH) into an upper-class Andalusian family of Arab descent. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that he is also described with multiple nisbahs, including al-Ḥaḍramī (reflecting claimed origins in Ḥaḍramawt), as well as al-Tūnisī and al-Maghribī due to his birth and long residence in North Africa. It further notes that the plague of 749/1348 was a major turning point during his youth, during which he lost close family members and teachers. Ibn Khaldun lost both his parents as well as some of his teachers in the plague of 749, or 1348. After this had occurred, Sultan Abū al-Ḥasan returned to Fez along with the scholars he had brought to Tunis. Ibn Khaldun originally intended to go to Fez with his teachers and continue his studies there, but his older brother Muḥammad advised him otherwise, effectively dissuading him. In his autobiography, Khaldun traces his descent back to the time of Prophet Muhammad through an Arab tribe from the south of the Arabian Peninsula, specifically the Hadhramaut, which came to the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century, at the beginning of the Islamic conquest: "And our ancestry is from Hadhramaut, from the Arabs of Arabian Peninsula, via Wa'il ibn Hujr also known as Hujr ibn 'Adi, from the best of the Arabs, well-known and respected." (p. 2429, Al-Waraq's edition). Ibn Khaldun's insistence and attachment to his claim of Arab ancestry at a time of Berber dynasties domination is a valid reason to believe his claim of Arab descent. Education His family's high rank enabled Ibn Khaldun to study with prominent teachers in Maghreb. He received a classical Islamic education, studying the Quran, which he memorized by heart, Arabic linguistics; the basis for understanding the Qur'an, hadith, sharia (law) and fiqh (jurisprudence). He received certification (ijazah) for all of those subjects. He recited the Quran to ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿd ibn Nazzāl, and this was done both individually and collectively. He learned Arabic from his father, who was named Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Sāʾirī, as well as a few other scholars. The mathematician and philosopher Al-Abili of Tlemcen introduced him to mathematics, logic, and philosophy. He studied the works of Averroes, Avicenna, Razi and Tusi. At the age of 17, Ibn Khaldūn lost both his parents to the Black Death, an intercontinental epidemic of the plague that hit Tunis in 1348–1349. Al-Sakhāwī reports that he memorized the Qur’an and studied qirāʾāt (including the seven readings), along with Arabic and Mālikī jurisprudence in Tunis before his later travels and state service.(entry no. 387)shif Following family tradition, he strove for a political career. In the face of a tumultuous political situation in North Africa, that required a high degree of skill in developing and dropping alliances prudently to avoid falling with the short-lived regimes of the time. Ibn Khaldūn's autobiography is the story of an adventure, in which he spends time in prison, reaches the highest offices and falls again into exile. == 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. Therefore, in 1378, he returned to his native Tunis, which had meanwhile been conquered by Abū l-Abbas, who took Ibn Khaldūn back into his service. There, he devoted himself almost exclusively to his studies and completed his history of the world. His relationship with Abū l-Abbas remained strained, as the latter questioned his loyalty. That was brought into sharp contrast after Ibn Khaldūn presented him with a copy of the completed history that omitted the usual panegyric to the ruler. Under pretence of going on the Hajj to Mecca, something for which a Muslim ruler could not simply refuse permission, Ibn Khaldūn was able to leave Tunis and to sail to Alexandria. == Later life ==

, Cairo Ibn Khaldun said of Egypt, "He who has not seen it does not know the power of Islam." While other Islamic regions had to cope with border wars and inner strife, Mamluk Egypt enjoyed prosperity and high culture. In 1384, the Egyptian Sultan, al-Malik udh-Dhahir Barquq, made Khaldun professor of the Qamhiyyah Madrasah and appointed him as the Grand qadi of the Maliki school of fiqh (one of four schools, the Maliki school was widespread primarily in Western Africa). Al-Sakhāwī similarly states that Ibn Khaldūn taught at al-Azhar and was appointed to the Mālikī judgeship in Cairo more than once. His efforts at reform encountered resistance, however, and within a year, he had to resign his judgeship. Also in 1384, a ship carrying Khaldun's wife and children sank off of Alexandria. After his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca in May 1388, Ibn Khaldūn concentrated on teaching at various Cairo madrasas. At the Mamluk court he fell from favor because during revolts against Barquq, he had, apparently under duress, with other Cairo jurists, issued a fatwa against Barquq. Later relations with Barquq returned to normal, and he was once again named the Maliki qadi. Altogether, he was called six times to that high office, which, for various reasons, he never held long. In 1401, under Barquq's successor, his son Faraj, Ibn Khaldūn took part in a military campaign against the Mongol conqueror, Timur, who besieged Damascus in 1400. Ibn Khaldūn cast doubt upon the viability of the venture and really wanted to stay in Egypt. His doubts were vindicated, as the young and inexperienced Faraj, concerned about a revolt in Egypt, left his army to its own devices in Syria and hurried home. Ibn Khaldūn remained at the besieged city for seven weeks, being lowered over the city wall by ropes to negotiate with Timur, in a historic series of meetings that he reported extensively in his autobiography. Timur questioned him in detail about conditions in the lands of the Maghreb. At his request, Ibn Khaldūn even wrote a long report about it. As he recognized Timur's intentions, he did not hesitate, on his return to Egypt, to compose an equally-extensive report on the history of the Tatars, together with a character study of Timur, sending them to the Merinid rulers in Fez. Ibn Khaldūn spent the next five years in Cairo completing his autobiography and his history of the world and acting as teacher and judge. Meanwhile, he was alleged to have joined an underground party, Rijal Hawa Rijal, whose reform-oriented ideals attracted the attention of local political authorities. The elderly Ibn Khaldun was placed under arrest. He died on 17 March 1406, one month after his sixth selection for the office of the Maliki qadi (Judge). == Works ==

'', MS 1936, f. 7a al-Muqaddima and the rest of Kitāb al-ʻIbar • Kitāb al-ʻIbar, (full title: Kitāb al-ʻIbar wa-Dīwān al-Mubtadaʼ wa-l-Khabar fī Taʼrīkh al-ʻArab wa-l-Barbar wa-Man ʻĀṣarahum min Dhawī ash-Shaʼn al-Akbār: "Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the History of the Arabs and the Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries"); begun as a history of the Berbers and expanded to a universal history in seven books. :Book 1; Al-Muqaddima ('The Introduction'), a socio-economic-geographical universal history of empires, and the best known of his works. :Books 2–5; World History up to the author's own time. :Books 6–7; Historiography of the Berbers and the Maghreb. Khaldun departs from the classical style of Arab historians by synthesising multiple, sometimes contradictory, sources without citations. He reproduces some errors originating probably from his 14th-century Fez source, the work Rawḍ al-Qirṭās by Ibn Abi Zar, yet ''Al-'Ibar'' remains an invaluable source of Berber history. Concerning the discipline of sociology, he described the dichotomy of sedentary life versus nomadic life as well as the inevitable loss of power that occurs when warriors conquer a city. Al-Sakhāwī describes Kitāb al-ʿIbar as Ibn Khaldūn’s major historical work and notes that it was prefaced with a lengthy introduction addressing civilization (ʿumrān), kingship, livelihood, and the sciences. This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion. Some of Ibn Khaldun's views, particularly those concerning the Zanj people of sub-Saharan Africa, Ibn Khaldun also called for the creation of a science to explain society and went on to outline these ideas in his major work, the Muqaddimah, which states that "Civilization and its well-being, as well as business prosperity, depend on productivity and people's efforts in all directions in their own interest and profit". Ibn Khaldun diverged from norms that Muslim historians followed and rejected their focus on the credibility of the transmitter and focused instead on the validity of the stories and encouraged critical thinking. Ibn Khaldun also outlines early theories of division of labor, taxes, scarcity, and economic growth. He argued that poverty was a result of the destruction of morality and human values. He also looked at what factors contribute to wealth, such as consumption, government, and investment. Khaldun also argued that poverty was not necessarily a result of poor financial decision-making but of external consequences and therefore the government should be involved in alleviating poverty. Researchers from Malaysia's Insaniah University College and Indonesia's Tazkia University College of Islamic Economics created a dynamics model based upon Ibn Khaldun's writings to measure poverty in the Muslim nations of South Asia and Southeast Asia. Ibn Khaldun also believed that the currency of an Islamic monetary system should have intrinsic value and therefore be made of gold and silver (such as the dirham). He emphasized that the weight and purity of these coins should be strictly followed: the weight of one dinar should be one mithqal (the weight of 72 grains of barley, roughly 4.25 grams) and the weight of 7 dinar should be equal to weight of 10 dirhams (7/10 of a mithqal or 2.96 grams). Ibn Khaldun's writings regarding the division of labor are often compared to Adam Smith's writings on the topic. Both Ibn Khaldun and Smith shared the idea that the division of labor is fundamental to economic growth, however, the motivations and context for such division differed between them. For Ibn Khaldun, asabiyyah or social solidarity was the underlying motive and context behind the division of labor; for Smith it was self-interest and the market economy. To Ibn Khaldun, the state was a necessity of human society to restrain injustice within the society, but the state means is force, thus itself an injustice. All societies must have a state governing them in order to establish a society. He attempted to standardize the history of societies by identifying ubiquitous phenomena present in all societies. To him, civilization was a phenomenon that will be present as long as humans exist. He characterized the fulfillment of basic needs as the beginning of civilization. At the beginning, people will look for different ways of increasing productivity of basic needs and expansion will occur. Later the society starts becoming more sedentary and focuses more on crafting, arts and the more refined characteristics. By the end of a society, it will weaken, allowing another small group of individuals to come into control. The conquering group is described as an unsatisfied group within the society itself or a group of desert bandits that constantly attack other weaker or weakened societies. In the Muqaddimah, his most important work, he discusses an introduction of philosophy to history in a general manner, based on observable patterns within a theoretical framework of known historical events of his time. He described the beginnings, development, cultural trends and the fall of all societies, leading to the rise of a new society which would then follow the same trends in a continuous cycle. Also, he recommended the best political approaches to develop a society according to his knowledge of history. He heavily emphasized that a good society would be one in which a tradition of education is deeply rooted in its culture. He believed that the reason why non-Arabs were accepted as part of Arab society was due to their mastery of the Arabic language. Advancements in literary works such as poems and prose were another way to distinguish the achievement of a civilization, but Ibn Khaldun believed that whenever the literary facet of a society reaches its highest levels it ceases to indicate societal achievements anymore, but is an embellishment of life. For logical sciences he established knowledge at its highest level as an increase of scholars and the quality of knowledge. For him the highest level of literary productions would be the manifestation of prose, poems and the artistic enrichment of a society. Religious thought Ibn Khaldun believes that communication between the tangible and intangible world is the basis of every religion, and the credit for its occurrence is the human spirit, as it is the mediator between God and humans. It is immortal by nature and does not perish, and has characteristics that enable it to communicate with God. However, most souls have lost their hidden ability and are connected to the sensory world only. A small number of them still maintain their full ability to communicate with God. These are the ones God chose and they became prophets, so their souls leave the sensory world to receive from God. Their souls abandon the sensory world in order to receive from God what they should convey to humans. Religions arise only from this connection. He believes that religions that rely on institutions of prediction and reconnaissance are false, but they partly contain some truth. A person's concentration on a specific thing for a long period makes him forget everything and become attached to what he focused on. Only, this focus makes him see the non-sensory world very quickly and in a very imperfect way, and these are pagan religions. Ibn Khaldun agrees with Sufism and believes that if a person maintains his good faith and is stripped of the desire to create a new religion and strives to separate himself from the sensory world, he will be able to approach the divine essence and the ideas of scholars will appear to him clearly. But if he strives in this detachment and mysticism out of a desire to excel over others, he will not communicate with God, but with demons. Also, the human spirit is able to see some things of the future through vision, but on the condition that this spirit be completely upright and very pious and pure, otherwise the vision will come from the devils. Minor works From other sources we know of several other works, primarily composed during the time he spent in North Africa and Al-Andalus. His first book, Lubābu l-Muhassal, a commentary on the Islamic theology of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, was written at the age of 19 under the supervision of his teacher Al-Abili in Tunis. A work on Sufism, ''Shifā'u l-Sā'il, was composed around 1373 in Fes, Morocco. Whilst at the court of Muhammed V, Sultan of Granada, Ibn Khaldūn composed a work on logic, ʻallaqa li-s-Sulṭān''. == Legacy ==

with a maximum revenue point at around a 70%, as estimated by Trabandt and Uhlig (2009). Laffer cites Ibn Khaldun's observation that "at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments." Egypt Ibn Khaldun's historical method had very few precedents or followers in his time. While Ibn Khaldun is known to have been a successful lecturer on jurisprudence within religious sciences, only very few of his students were aware of, and influenced by, his Muqaddimah. One such student, Al-Maqrizi, praised the Muqaddimah, although some scholars have found his praise, and that of others, to be generally empty and lacking understanding of Ibn Khaldun's methods. According to Ibn Arabshah, during this meeting, Ibn Khaldun and Tamerlane discussed the Maghrib in depth, as well as Tamerlane's genealogy and place in history. Ibn Khaldun began gaining more attention from 1806, when Silvestre de Sacy's Chrestomathie Arabe included his biography together with a translation of parts of the Muqaddimah as the Prolegomena. In 1816, de Sacy again published a biography with a more detailed description on the Prolegomena. More details on and partial translations of the Prolegomena emerged over the years until the complete Arabic edition was published in 1858. Since then, the work of Ibn Khaldun has been extensively studied in the Western world with special interest. Reynold A. Nicholson praised Ibn Khaldun as a uniquely brilliant Muslim sociologist, but discounted Khaldun's influence. Ernest Gellner, once a professor of philosophy and logic at the London School of Economics, considered Khaldun's definition of government the best in the history of political theory. More moderate views on the scope of Ibn Khaldun's contributions have also emerged. Arthur Laffer, for whom the Laffer curve is named, acknowledged that Ibn Khaldun's ideas, as well as others, precede his own work on that curve. Economist Paul Krugman described Ibn Khaldun as "a 14th-century Islamic philosopher who basically invented what we would now call the social sciences". 19th century Scottish theologian and philosopher Robert Flint praised him strongly, "as a theorist of history he had no equal in any age or country until Vico appeared, more than three hundred years later. Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him". Ibn Khaldun's work on evolution of societies also influenced Egon Orowan, who introduced the concept of socionomy. While Ibn Khaldun's record-keeping is usually passed over in favor of recognizing his contributions to the science of history, Abderrahmane Lakhsassi wrote "No historian of the Maghreb since and particularly of the Berbers can do without his historical contribution." Public recognition Public recognition of Ibn Khaldun has increased in recent years. In 2004, the Tunisian Community Center launched the first Ibn Khaldun Award to recognize a Tunisian/American high achiever whose work reflects Ibn Khaldun's ideas of kinship and solidarity. The Award was named after Ibn Khaldun for the convergence of his ideas with the organization's objectives and programs. In 2006, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation launched an annual essay contest for students named in Ibn Khaldun's honor. The theme of the contest is "how individuals, think tanks, universities and entrepreneurs can influence government policies to allow the free market to flourish and improve the lives of its citizens based on Islamic teachings and traditions." In 2007, İbn Haldun Üniversitesi has opened in Istanbul, Turkey, to commemorate his name. The university promotes a policy of trilingualism. The languages in question are English, Modern Turkish, and Arabic and its emphasis is on teaching social sciences. In 1981 U.S. President Ronald Reagan cited Ibn Khaldun as an influence on his supply-side economic policies, also known as Reaganomics. He paraphrased Ibn Khaldun, who said that "in the beginning of the dynasty, great tax revenues were gained from small assessments," and that "at the end of the dynasty, small tax revenues were gained from large assessments." Reagan said his goal is "trying to get down to the small assessments and the great revenues." The Iraqi Navy named a frigate after Ibn Khaldun. == Bibliography ==