Abdurahman bin Muhammad bin Muhammad bin Muhammad bin Al-Hasan bin Jabir bin Muhammad bin Ibrahim bin Abdurahman bin Ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami – Ibn Khaldun for short - is one of the most significant thinkers of the Middle Ages. Born in Tunisia in 1332 to a family from Andalusia – the parts of Spain that were, in the early Middle Ages Muslim, Ibn Khaldun was a writer, scholar, military leader and politician. In war, he led campaigns against the Turkic raider Timur (Tamerlane), and played a role in the machinations between Christian Castile, Tunisia, Egypt, and the Berber tribes of the Maghreb (North Africa).

But what Ibn Khaldun is best known for is his writing. His Muqaddimah is a provocative work that introduces several concepts that would only much later make their way into European thought. For instance, Ibn Khaldun introduces a cyclical notion of history. Whereas previous thinkers saw a gradual rise towards sedentary, agricultural life, Ibn Khaldun noted how periods of nomadic (Berber) rule came on the heels of settled life, and presented the tension between two ways of living – settled societies eventually decay, and more dynamic, adaptable nomads conquer them, only to find themselves growing accustomed to the comfort of their former foes. Such an idea was not to enter European thought until the work of Karl Marx, who also presented a notion of a productive clash between different economic modes as the driver of history.

Ibn Khaldun’s legacy is received with near-universal praise. European historians from Machiavelli to Gellner cite Ibn Khaldun as one of the most influential thinkers in history, and governments in Tunisia and Turkey place the scholar’s name on prizes, monuments and bank notes.