The Islamic historian who can explain why some states fail and others succeed

I have a new Kindle Single out, an essay on the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, who can rightly claim to be called the ‘father of social science’.

Ibn Khaldun is underrated in the west, compared to the other great philosophers and historians of the ages, but he enjoys a cult following because his central theory of human society seems ever more relevant today – that is, asabiyyah, or ‘group feeling’. Group feeling explains why the individual-centred western worldview has proved so inadequate in explaining things since the fall of Communism, especially in the Middle East.

Born in Tunis on May 27, 1332, Ibn Khaldun pioneered the fields of sociology and history, as well as touching on economics and science, during his long life spent serving as an ambassador and supreme justice across the Islamic Mediterranean. His history book the Muqaddimah puts him up with Herodotus and Thucydides as one of the fathers of that discipline, while the Scottish theologian Robert Flint once said that ‘Plato, Aristotle and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him’. Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi, said of him that ‘he has every claim to be called the world’s first sociologist. Not for another 300 years would the West produce a figure of comparable originality.’

Ibn Khaldun was very much a product of the pan-Islamic world, which was then coming to the end of its golden age. His family had originated in southern Arabia in the 9th century before moving to Spain, although they may have originally been Berbers who adopted an Arab identity in order to acquire status. They had fled from Seville following its capture by the Christians in 1248 and his family held office under the Berber Hafsid dynasty that had come to power in North Africa in 1229, but his father and grandfather had retired from public life – and Ibn Khaldun’s turbulent life would suggest their decision to be wise.

As a boy, Ibn Khaldun was taught by some of the best scholars in the Maghreb, learning the Koran as well as Islamic law, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics and philosophy. Among the Muslim thinkers he studied were Avicenna, the eleventh-century author of the Book of Healing who produced hundreds of works during the peak of Islamic intellectual flourishing; Averroes, the great philosopher of medieval Cordoba, who promoted the work of Aristotle; and the Iranian Fakhruddin Razi, who first posited the multiverse hypothesis in the 12th century. Ibn Khaldun would also have read much Greek philosophy, which had been translated into Arabic in Mesopotamia by Syriac-speaking Christians fluent in both languages. ...