Ibn Khaldun and the Foundations of the Philosophy of History

Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was born in Tunis into a family of Andalusian origin that had emigrated to Ifriqiya (roughly modern Tunisia) after the fall of Seville to the Christians in 1248, and his own turbulent career — serving successively as a diplomat, courtier, and judge under a shifting succession of Marinid, Hafsid, and Nasrid rulers across the Maghreb and briefly in Granada, and repeatedly falling in and out of favor amid the political instability of fourteenth-century North Africa — gave him direct, firsthand exposure to the rise and collapse of dynastic power that became the central subject of his mature scholarship. In 1375, following a period of political disillusionment, Ibn Khaldun withdrew for roughly four years to the fortress of Qal'at Ibn Salama in what is now Algeria, and it was there, in comparative isolation, that he composed the bulk of the Muqaddima (Introduction), completed in 1377 as the theoretical prolegomenon to his larger universal history, Kitab al-Ibar.