'A superb account of how a historian developed his own historical methodology.... Highly recommended.'
/Choice/
The first complete, scholarly English-language biography of Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) is one of the most influential and important Muslim thinkers in history, inspiring at least as much interest among modern scholars as his immediate contemporaries. Legions of sociologists, anthropologists and historians have studied his philosophy of history, treating the /Muqaddimah/ as a timeless piece of philosophy. Yet most studies ignore the fascinating story of Ibn Khaldun's own life and times.
Rejecting portrayals of him as a modern mind lost in medieval obscurity, Allen James Fromherz demonstrates how Ibn Khaldun's ideas were shaped by his historical context and personal motivations. Relying on original Arabic sources, most importantly Ibn Khaldun's unique autobiography, this is the first complete, scholarly biography of Ibn Khaldun in English. It not only tells the life story of Ibn Khaldun in an accessible way, it also introduces readers to the fourteenth-century Mediterranean world. Seen in this politically tumultuous and religiously contentious context, Ibn Khaldun's ideas about tribalism, identity, religion and history are even more relevant to pressing, modern concerns.
Allen James Fromherz is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Mediterranean and Islamic History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is author of /The Almohads: The Rise of an Islamic Empire (2010) and /Qatar: A Modern History/ (2011).