Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun was the greatest Arab historian and one of the most original social thinkers in world history. His Muqaddimah—the introduction to his vast history of the Berber peoples—constitutes a fully worked-out philosophy of history and what he called the science of human civilisation, making him arguably the founder of sociology, economics, and historiography as systematic disciplines.

Ibn Khaldun's central concept was asabiyya—social cohesion or group feeling—which he used to explain the rise and fall of dynasties and civilisations in cyclical terms. Empires are built by groups with strong solidarity, but prosperity gradually corrupts that solidarity, leading to decline. This empirical and sociological approach to history was entirely without precedent in the medieval world and anticipates approaches that would not appear in Europe for centuries.