Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

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The definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the Muqaddima

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) is usually regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world–a genius who ranks as one of the crucial world’s great minds. Yet the writer of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well referred to as he will have to be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun’s odd life, times, writings, and ideas.

Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and author. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun’s life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun’s ideas frequently seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has frequently been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin’s account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism.

In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time―a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an frequently-unusual world fairly different from our own.

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