Islam. 105derstood it. Ibn Taymiyyah was imprisoned, and was said to
have died of sorrow, since his gaolers would not permit him
to write. But the ordinary people of Damascus loved him, be-
cause they could see that his Shariah reforms had been lib-
eral, and that he had had their interests at heart. His funeral
became a massive demonstration of popular acclaim.
Change could be exciting but it was also disturbing. In
Tunis, Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun (1 332-1406) watched one
dynasty after another fail in the Maghrib, the western region
of the Islamic world. Plague destroyed whole communities.
Nomadic tribes had migrated from Egypt into North Africa,
causing massive devastation and a corresponding decline in
traditional Berber society. Ibn Khaldun had himself emigrated
to Tunisia from Spain, where the Christians had conducted a
successful reconquista of Muslim territory, taking Cordova in
1236 and Seville in 1248. All that was left of the thriving Mus-
lim kingdom of al-Andalus was the city-state of Granada,
which would be defeated by the Christians in 1492, but not be-
fore building the magnificent Alhambra palace there in the
mid fourteenth century. Islam was clearly in crisis. "When
there is an entire alteration of conditions," Ibn Khaldun re-
flected, "it is as if the whole creation had changed and all the
world had been transformed, as if there were a new creation, a
rebirth, a world brought into existence anew."^3
Ibn Khaldun wanted to discover the underlying causes of
this change. He was probably the last great Spanish Faylasuf;
his great innovation was to apply the principles of philo-
sophic rationalism to the study of history, hitherto considered
to be beneath the notice of a philosopher, because it dealt
only with transient, fleeting events instead of eternal truths.
But Ibn Khaldun believed that, beneath the flux of historical
incidents, universal laws governed the fortunes of society. He
decided that it was a strong sense of group solidarity {asi-
biyyah) that enabled a people to survive and, if conditions