Ibn Khaldun and the Muqaddimah

Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis, served at the courts of the Maghreb and Andalusia, knew coups and upheavals from the inside, and in the seclusion of a fortress wrote the introduction to his universal history. In the Muqaddimah he looks for the laws by which societies live: solidarity — asabiyyah — lifts a tribe to power, and luxury and city softness dissolve it within three or four generations, and the circle turns again. Taxes, crafts, climate and the growth of cities he treats as forces of history, not as its ornament. Europe will discover him in the nineteenth century and name him a forerunner of sociology.