the Umayyad and abbasid caliphates, an account
of the Mongol invasions, and a history of
Damascus. Ibn Kathir became blind at the end of
his life and was buried in the Sufiyya Cemetery
near the grave of his teacher Ibn Taymiyya.
Further reading: Ibn Kathir, The Life of the Prophet
Muhammad. 4 vols. Translated by Trevor Le Gassick
(London: Garnett Publishing, 1998–2000); ———,
Tafsir Ibn Kathir. 10 vols., abridged. English translation
by Safiur-Rahman Al-Mubarakpuri (Riyadh, Saudi Ara-
bia: Dar-es-Salam Publications, 2000).
Ibn Khaldun, Abd al-Rahman ibn
Muhammad (1332–1406) medieval scholar
famed for his philosophy of history and insights into
the rise and fall of civilizations
Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis to a family of court
officials and religious scholars that had emigrated
from Seville in Islamicate Spain (andalUsia) dur-
ing the 13th century. His father, Muhammad, was
a jurist who saw to it that his son acquired a thor-
ough edUcation in the traditional religious sci-
ences, including qUran studies, hadith, and fiqh
(jurisprudence)—especially that of the maliki
legal school. This was a time when intellectual
and cultural life in Tunis prospered under the
rule of the Marinids, a berber dynasty that ruled
parts of North Africa and Andalusia from 1196
to 1464. After the Black Death took the lives of
both his parents in 1348–49, Ibn Khaldun left
to work in the Marinid court in Fez. He became
deeply involved in political affairs there but con-
tinued to further his formal education as well. In
1362, he joined the court of the Nasirid dynasty
(1212–1492) in Granada, Spain, and led a peace
delegation to the Christian ruler Pedro the Cruel
in Seville in 1364. At this time in his career, his
chief mentor, Ibn al-Khatib (d. 1374), described
him as a man who “commands respect, is able
... unruly, strong-willed, and full of ambitions
for climbing to the highest position of leadership”
(Mahdi, 40).
Leaving Andalusia to further enhance his
career, Ibn Khaldun traveled to algeria, where he
was briefly employed as an adviser to the Hafsid
ruler there and as a preacher and jurist. However,
these were turbulent times in the Maghrib (North
Africa), and after repeated attempts to secure
long-term employment, he retired to a desert oasis
near Oran in 1374, where he and his family lived
under the protection of a friendly Arab desert
tribe. Renouncing a career in politics, he dedi-
cated himself to a scholar’s life and began to write
the famous introduction, known as the “Muqad-
dima,” to his universal history of the Arabs and
Berbers (Kitab al-Ibar). In 1378, Ibn Khaldun
returned to his native Tunis, but, in 1382, he went
to cairo, egypt, where his scholarly reputation
earned him several appointments as a teacher of
Maliki law and as the city’s chief Maliki jurist.
In his aUtobiography, he called his new home
“the metropolis of the world... illuminated by
the moons and stars of its learned men.” He was
to spend the remaining years of his life there,
completing and revising his multivolume history
(seven volumes long in its Arabic printed edition)
and offering advice to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt
and his former royal patrons in Tunis. When the
Mongol armies of tamerlane (d. 1405) invaded
syria in 1400, Ibn Khaldun reluctantly accom-
panied the mamlUk army to damascUs to oppose
the invasion. During the siege, he was invited to
a lengthy audience with the Mongol conqueror.
According to the scholar’s account, the two men
discussed their respective views of history and the
rise and fall of civilizations for 35 days, and Ibn
Khaldun provided Tamerlane with information
about the peoples and lands of Egypt and North
Africa. Tamerlane’s forces plundered Damascus,
but Ibn Khaldun negotiated his own freedom and
returned to Cairo, where he held several posts as a
Maliki judge and scholar. He also finished writing
his autobiography and made the final revisions in
his universal history before his death in 1406.
The Muqaddima is encyclopedic in scope; it
expresses Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history andK 334 Ibn Khaldun, Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad