Ibn Khaldun ‘Abdurrahman (1332–1406), Arab historian, scholar, and politician, the first thinker to articulate a comprehensive theory of historiography and philosophy of history in his Muqaddima (final revision 1402), the introductory volume to his Universal History (Kitab al-‘ibar, 1377–82). Born and raised in Tunis, he spent the politically active first part of his life in northwestern Africa and Muslim Spain. He moved to Cairo in 1382 to pursue a career as professor of Maliki law and judge. Ibn Khaldun created in the Muqaddima (English translation by F. Rosenthal, 1967) what he called an ‘entirely original science.’ He established a scientific methodology for historiography by providing a theory of the basic laws operating in history so that not only could the occurrences of the past be registered but also ‘the how and why of events’ could be understood. Historiography is based on the criticism of sources; the criteria to be used are inherent probability of the historical reports (khabar; plural: akhbar) – to be judged on the basis of an understanding of significant political, economic, and cultural factors – and their conformity with reality and the nature of the historical process. The latter he analyzed as the cyclical (every three generations, c.120 years) rise and decline of human societies (‘umran) insofar as they exhibit a political cohesiveness (‘afabiya) in accepting the authority of a dynastic head of state. Ibn Khaldun’s sources were the actual course of Islamic history and the injunctions about political and social behavior found in the Greek/Persian/Arab mirrors for princes and wisdom literature, welded together by an Aristotelian teleological realism/empiricism; by contrast, he was critical of the metaphysical Platonic utopias of thinkers like al-Farabi. His influence is to be felt in later Arab authors and in particular in Ottoman historiography. In the West, where he has been intensely studied since the eighteenth century, he has been variously seen as the founder of sociology, economic history, and other modern theories of state. (See A. Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun, 1989.)
See also ARABIC PHILOSOPH. D.Gu.