Ibn Khaldun wrote his masterpiece on the rise and fall of states in six months
A 14th-century scholar from Tunis produced the Muqaddimah, an introduction to history so penetrating that later Ottoman historians used it to diagnose their own empire's decline. Modern writers compare him with Machiavelli, Hume, Adam Smith and Marx. He claimed to have written it in half a year, after a life of plague and palace intrigue.
Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in May 1332 into the Banu Khaldun, an Andalusian family of Yemeni Arab descent that had held high office in Seville for centuries before leaving in 1232, ahead of the Christian conquest. His grandfather served Hafsid rulers as chamberlain, but his father stepped away from politics for law, literature and piety, and became his son's first teacher.
The Black Death struck in his youth, killing both his parents, much of his extended family and many of his teachers. Historians including Allen Fromherz argue the catastrophe shaped his thinking about cities and public sanitation and helped spur the Muqaddimah. His most important teacher, al-Abili, whom he called the grand master of the rational sciences, trained him in philosophy, logic and mathematics and left him wary of state-run madrasas that spread official views.
His political career was restless. At 20 he was a calligrapher of official seals in Tunis; in Fez he wrote royal proclamations, schemed against the sultan and served 22 months in prison. In Granada, the Nasrid ruler Muhammad V sent him in 1364 to Pedro the Cruel of Castile to confirm a peace treaty; he succeeded and turned down Pedro's offer to stay and recover his family's Spanish estates. Rivalry with the vizier Ibn al-Khatib pushed him back to North Africa, and he reached Cairo in 1380.
His autobiography, called by Fromherz the most detailed in medieval Muslim literature, is oddly sparing with personal feeling. Scholars divide his life into phases: two by Walter Fischel, Maghreb and Egypt, or three twenty-year stretches by Syed Farid Alatas, covering study, politics and scholarship. He even met Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Empire, before dying in 1406.
Source: Ibn Khaldun
