Keywords
Arabic Muslims, Sunni Muslims, history, Ibn Khaldun
Abstract
Robert Irwin (b. 1946), a British historian, novelist, and essayist, became so enthralled by Arabic Muslim society, politics, language, literature, and culture that while reading modern history at Oxford University in the 1960’s, he became a Muslim during his first summer vacation which he spent at a Sufi Alawi foundation in Algeria. In parallel, he developed a fascination for the Tunisian polymath, Wali al-Din ‘Abd al Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who has been variously described as the greatest Muslim intellectual, the greatest social scientist of the Middle Ages, the founder of Sociology and the critical study of history, and a precursor of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the Laffer Curve. Ibn Khaldun, however, did not view history as a separate discipline, nor himself as a philosopher of history. Rather, he viewed himself as a devout Sunni Muslim and as such an interpreter of history, and his most famous work, the Muqaddima (Prolegomena), as ‘an entirely original science’ (p. ix).
Recommended Citation
Barrows, Leland Conley
(2023)
"Book Review: Robert Irwin. Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography,"
Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 88:
No.
88, Article 19.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol88/iss88/19
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