A life spent changing employers
Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332 into a family of Andalusian notables who had left Seville a century earlier as Christian armies advanced. The Black Death reached the city when he was seventeen and killed both his parents and most of his teachers, an experience he later described as a break in the fabric of civilisation itself. He entered government young, in a North Africa split among the Hafsids, the Marinids and the Zayyanids, where a talented secretary could rise quickly and fall faster.
He served most of them in turn. He carried correspondence for rulers in Fez and Tlemcen, spent nearly two years in prison after backing a loser, crossed to Granada as an envoy of its Nasrid sultan, and was sent in 1364 on a mission to Pedro of Castile in Seville, the city his ancestors had fled. He negotiated with Berber tribes, recruited troops, changed sides, and by his forties had exhausted both his patrons and his appetite for court life.
Four years behind a wall
In 1375 he withdrew to a fortress at Qalat Ibn Salama in what is now Algeria and spent roughly four years writing. The result was the Muqaddimah, the introduction to a universal history, in which he set out to establish what he called a new science, the study of human social organisation. History as practised, he argued, was a catalogue of unverified anecdotes; the historian's job was to test reports against what is possible in the working of societies, and he demolished several accepted figures and legends on exactly those grounds.
His central mechanism is asabiyya, the group solidarity that binds people who share hardship and kinship. Groups from the harsh margins possess it in abundance and use it to overthrow soft, settled dynasties; then the conquerors settle, acquire luxury, tax their subjects harder, hire mercenaries in place of kinsmen, and lose the cohesion that brought them in, usually within three or four generations. Along the way he analyses the division of labour, the effect of high taxation on revenue, and the economics of city growth.
Cairo, Timur, and a late rediscovery
In 1382 he sailed for Egypt and spent his last twenty-four years in Cairo, teaching and serving six separate times as chief judge of the Maliki school, each appointment ending in resignation or dismissal because he applied the law with a strictness that made enemies. His wife and children drowned when their ship went down on the way to join him. In 1401, outside a besieged Damascus, he had himself lowered over the city wall to meet Timur, and spent weeks in the conqueror's camp answering questions about the Maghreb.
He died in Cairo in 1406. Ottoman historians read him closely, but Europe barely knew him until nineteenth-century translations made him a discovery, after which he was claimed as the founder of sociology, of economics, and of the philosophy of history in turn. The labels flatter and distort. He was explaining the dynastic churn of North Africa from inside an Islamic intellectual world, and he thought he had founded a science that his successors, as it happened, did not continue.
