Ibn Khaldun

1332-1406 · Tunisian (Andalusian descent; served in courts across the Maghreb, al-Andalus, and Mamluk Egypt) · Philosophy of history, social theory, historiography, political philosophy, economic thought, Islamic philosophy

Dynasties have a natural life-span like individuals.

Born in Tunis in 1332 to a family driven east by the Reconquista, Ibn Khaldun navigated the courts of North Africa and al-Andalus — Hafsids, Merinids, Nasrids — surviving imprisonment, until he retired to an Algerian castle and wrote the work that would outlast every prince he had served. In 1401, chief judge of Cairo, he descended from the walls of besieged Damascus to meet Timur. Few lives illustrate a doctrine so perfectly.

Topics Ibn Khaldun addresses

• 'asabiyya (group feeling, social solidarity)
• the science of civilization ('ilm al-'umran)
• the dynastic cycle
• badawa and hadara (nomadic vs settled life)
• mulk (royal authority)
• the natural lifespan of dynasties
• luxury and dynastic decline
• labor as the source of value
• the division of labor
• taxation and revenue
• the caliphate (khilafa)
• the three-generation pattern
• Bedouin society and tribal solidarity
• urban civilization and the city
• the crafts and ways of earning a livelihood
• prophecy and dreams
• Sufi mysticism
• the occult sciences
• the rejection of alchemy
• secondary causation
• the refutation of philosophical metaphysics
• the science of letters ('ilm al-huruf)
• historiography and the critique of historians
• the Berber tribes of the Maghreb

Converse with Ibn Khaldun on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Ibn Khaldun's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.