Ibn Khaldūn enjoyed all the privileges of princely positions and suffered the odds of their fluctuations in medieval courts. He shared in the political maneuvers and conspiracies that accompanied the rise and fall of different rulers, and in trying periods, when he was in prison or was forced into exile, he devoted himself to the study of power and meditated on its historic laws and social dynamics.
Ibn Khaldūn's greatest work, Al-Muqaddimah (The prolegomena), was the first of seven volumes of his universal history of the Arabs and Berbers, Kitab al-ʿIbar. Although the last two volumes are of special value to historians as the best source for the history of northwest Africa, especially for the history of the Berbers, the introduction that outlines ibn Khaldūn's philosophy of history overshadowed the narrative. The philosophic originality of this introduction was so great that ibn Khaldūn became known as the author of Al-Muqaddimah.
Prior to ibn Khaldūn, Muslim philosophers had concerned themselves with the reconciliation of Qurʾanic truth and rational truth, but this had led to an assimilation of Greek rationalism by Muslim theology rather than to the emergence of Muslim rationalism.
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