political fragmentation and cultural diversity 273A condition was well established by Ibn Taymìya, if the state takes
such a role: the individuals providing the service should not be autho-
rised to demand more than a fair value from the public, nor the
public should wrong them by giving them less than their fair value
or the government paying them less than a fair wage. The state
intervention should be seen within the general condition that mar-
ket forces failed to provide the society with these collective goods.
Now we come to perhaps the most renowned study in the Islamic
social history, Ibn-Khaldùn’s Mùqaddimah.
Ibn-Khaldùn (1332–1406)
al-Mùqaddimah, An Introduction to History
The Author
Abd-al-Rahman Abù Zayd ibn Muœammad ibn Muœammad ibn
Khaldùn, was born in Tunis in 1332 A.C. Ibn-Khaldùn’s life was
extremely colourful: a descendant of an aristocratic family, a jurist,
a statesman, a prime minister, a chief judge, a courtier, a prisoner,
an exile, and a scholar. This experience added to the quality of his
thinking and made him the scholar we know. In this Rosenthal says,
“The love of learning and intellectual pursuits for which his father
and grandfather were noted, coupled with the political aspirations
that fired a long line of his Moorish forebears, produced the rare
combination of philosopher and statesman that we find in ibn-
Khaldùn”, (Rozenthal, 1967). Like the scholars of his time, his edu-
cation began with studying the Qur"àn, the Sunnah, jurisprudence,
and later, the study of the Arab mysticism and the philosophy of
the Moorish Aristotelians. He was appointed in a government posi-
tion, to be thrown in prison on suspicion of his loyalty to the flulňn,
to be released after a year or so, to be appointed again in the ser-
vice of the successor flulňn. In his life, he moved between Tunis,
Fez, Cordoba, and Cairo where he was made the Grand Judge of
the Màlikì for Cairo, Damascus and Makkah for pilgrimage. After
a rich life of learning, political and social experience, including a
personal tragedy when all his family drowned in a wrecked ship
when they were sailing from North Africa to join him in Egypt, he
died in 1406. He was buried in the flùfìcemetery outside Cairo.