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In contrast to Confucius, whose biographical details are less known and shrouded in mythology, Ibn Khaldun’s life and work are well documented. Although Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332 (AH 723) his family had aristocratic, Arab-Andalusian, origins. The Banū Khaldūns were part of the ruling elite in ninth-century Seville. Ibn Khaldun’s family emigrated to Tunis just before the fall of Seville in the Reconquista in 1248. While most of his male family members held political offices under the Hafsid dynasty in Tunis, Ibn Khaldun’s grandfather and father abandoned politics and became members of a mystic order. This highly privileged family background allowed Ibn Khaldun to be educated by leading North African scholars and imams. His main teacher was Al-Abili, a proponent of both the rational sciences and the occult arts. In addition to classical Islamic texts, his early education included Arab linguistics, law and jurisprudence, mathematics, poetry, logic and philosophy. He memorised the Qur’an by heart and was well versed in the works of the world’s leading philosophers of his time including Averroes, Avicenna, Razi and Tusi. Similarly to Confucius, Ibn Khaldun lost his parents when he was relatively young (aged 17).

For much of his life Ibn Khaldun was a skilful politician who managed to survive, and navigate, the tides of the complex, chronically unstable and unpredictable world of medieval North Africa and the Middle East. He came to age in the midst of protracted inter-dynastic conflicts in the region where loyalty to a current ruler regularly indicated a high probability of being beheaded by his successor. Ibn Khaldun started as an official at the court of Ibn Tafrakin with responsibility for calligraphic writing, marking and ratification of royal correspondence. Although this position gave him direct access to state secrets, he considered it to be beneath his talents. To further his political career he moved to the city of Fez where he worked at the court of Abu ‘Inan. He was soon accused of treachery and imprisoned for nearly two years, to be released upon the king’s death. The new king, Abu Salim, appointed Ibn Khaldun to several senior posts, but once the ruler was murdered Ibn Khaldun had to flee the city. Following this he spent several years as a high official at the court of Ibn al-Khatib in Grenada, but after a serious quarrel had to leave the city. For the next nine years Ibn Khaldun travelled around the Maghreb collecting tribal levies and negotiating with the various tribal groupings on behalf of several rulers. It is this period that has proved central for Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual development: during one of his expeditions into the Dawawida tribal region he decided to retire to the Sufi shrine, near contemporary Mascara in Algeria, and devote his time to scholarship.

The result of his four-year retreat to this shrine was The Muqaddimah (1377), the most significant proto-sociological study written before the modern era. The search for more extensive library resources and ill health forced Ibn Khaldun to move to Tunis in 1378, where he spent the next four years as a teacher and scholar. The persistent court intrigues and intellectual animosities with other scholars and imams led to another period of exile – this time to Alexandria where Ibn Khaldun was appointed a grand Maliki judge at the Mamluk court of Abu Sa’id Barquaq, in 1384. During his stay in Egypt he held several high positions including the Superior at the Baibarsiya Sufi lodge and the professor of Maliki law at Quamhiyyah College in Cairo. However, most of his time was devoted to research and the writing of what he considered to be his main work, to which The Muqaddimah was merely an introduction – The Book of Exemplaries and the Record of Narrative and its Principles concerning Arabs, Persians, and the Berbers, and those Nations of Great Might Contemporary with Them. During his time in Cairo Ibn Khaldun made pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem and had highly eventful visits to Damascus where he experienced the siege and destruction of the city by Tamerlane. The famous conqueror invited Ibn Khaldun to spend time in his company and to write a geographical report on North Africa. Ibn Khaldun died in 1406 and was buried in the Sufi cemetery outside Cairo’s main gates.

At first glance it might seem that, unlike Confucius whose ideas developed in a protracted struggle with competing schools of thought, Ibn Khaldun was an intellectual loner removed from the leading scholarly networks of his day. Some commentators insist that because he was ‘remote from the intellectual centres’ and ‘without significant structural ties of his own’ Ibn Khaldun’s teachings had little impact on the development of Islamic philosophy (Collins, 1998: 428). It is true that, unlike Confucius, Ibn Khaldun did not have any recognisable followers and that his work has largely been forgotten for centuries (Lacoste, 1984: 1). Nevertheless, the creativity of his social thought did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. On the contrary, for much of his life Ibn Khaldun was in a dialogue with the dominant intellectual perspectives of his time.

In his early years Ibn Khaldun was profoundly influenced by the leading logician Abelli. His education in philosophy and theology was largely built on the works of leading ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century rationalist philosophers such as Al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rochd (Averroes). He was very well versed in historiography, which at that time was a highly developed research field in the Islamic world. In this context much of Ibn Khaldun’s work represents a direct or indirect engagement with rationalist philosophy and logic, mysticism, theology and the historiography of his day. Although all his main works are rooted in the rationalist principles derived from the work of Ibn Sina, Ibn Tatmiyah, Ibn Rochd or al-Kindi, he is also a fierce critic of their philosophies. In contrast to the dynastic narratives and hagiographies that dominated the historiography of his day Ibn Khaldun advocated the development of historical science rooted in the principles of causality and rationality. For Ibn Khaldun, history is an empirical endeavour that relies upon observation with a view of generating universalist findings. History is not to be viewed as a branch of literature but ‘is firmly rooted in science’ (2005: 6). More specifically he distinguishes between conventional views of history and its scientific purpose:

On the surface, history is no more that information about political events, dynasties, and occurrences of the remote past, clearly presented and spiced with proverbs. It serves to entertain large, crowded gatherings… The inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanations of the causes and origins of existing things, the deep knowledge of the how and why of events. (Ibn Khaldun, 2005: 6)

In a similar vein to Confucius, Ibn Khaldun was deeply responsive to the dominant intellectual currents of his period. He wrote commentaries on the works of leading philosophers such as al Roushd and Razi and he was involved in stringent debates in theology, history, logic and politics. Although he too, just like Confucius, was living in times of civilisational decline characterised by continuous political and ideological conflicts, he was an heir of the highly advanced Islamic civilisation. His ideas and teachings were well known and debated throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Although the rationalist discourses were on defence as much of the medieval Muslim world was gradually moving away from rationalism towards religious mysticism, the cities Ibn Khaldun inhabited, namely Fez, Grenada, Bougie and Cairo, were still important university centres with prolific intellectual life. These intellectual disputes have found their reflection in many of Ibn Khaldun’s works where he continuously attempts to reconcile his analytical rationalism with the religious mysticism that was slowly but surely gaining the upper hand all over the Maghreb and the rest of the Islamic world.