A few years later, he fell out with a number of top officials and migrated to Granada, Andalusia, Spain. Sultan Abū Salem’s ministerĪn ambitious man who would stoop low and scheme against his employers, Khaldun finally had his big break after Sultan Abū Salem handed him a ministerial job. However, less than a year later and following the death of Sultan Abu Inan, he was freed from prison by Vizier al-Hasan ibn-Umar. In 1357, he was slapped with more than a year prison sentence for sabotaging the rule of the sultan. Khaldūn and his tutor left Tunis for Fez (a Moroccan city located northeast of the Atlas Mountains), where the former was appointed to serve as a clerk in the court of Marinid sultan Abu Inan Fares I. Hardly had he began to acclimatize to his new job when the Sultan of Constantine Abu Ziad toppled the rulers of Tunis. ![]() When he was twenty years of age, he secured perhaps his first major job as a seal-bearer ( Kātib al-‘Alāmah) in the government of Ibn Tafrakin, then-ruler of Tunisia. His autobiography paints a vivid picture of maze-like political environment that existed in Tunis at the time. Seeking to make a big splash in the political arena in Tunis, Ibn Khaldūn studied copiously to gain the skills that would help him navigate the ever-changing political landscape that saw regimes come and go at a very fast pace. He even wrote his own summaries of books by Averroes. He immediately took a strong liking to works of famous Arab philosophers and polymaths like Averroes, Razi, and Avicenna. He also studied mathematics and philosophy under the guidance of Tlemcen philosopher Al-Abili. Such was his focus that he memorized the Quran at a very early age. Some of the subjects that he studied include Quran studies, Arabic linguistics and classical Islamic studies. Owing to his family’s status within the society, he had the privilege of being tutored by some of the best teachers in Tunis. Ibn Khaldun was in his mid-teens when both his parents succumbed to the Black Death, a bubonic plague that took the lives of tens of millions of the world’s population. His father, for example, was an influential administrator in the city before he later committed his life fully to Islamic studies and letters. In Tunis, the family was treated very well by the Sunni-majority Tunisian Hafsid dynasty (1229-1574), making them one of the most influential families in the city. His upper-class family was of Arab descent and from Al-Andalus (present-day Spain and Portugal) in the Iberian Peninsula.įollowing the fall of Seville to Christian forces in 1248, his family, who occupied a very important status in Seville, migrated to Tunis. Ibn Khaldun was born in the year 1332 AD in Tunis. ![]() The famous Florence-born Renaissance author and diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli had very positive things to say about Khaldūn, calling him one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages. For centuries, the Middle Ages scholar’s works, including his masterpiece the Muqaddimah(“Introduction”), had tremendous influence on many scholars across the world. Arab scholar and philosopher Ibn Khaldun was an influential figure in the formation of modern disciplines such as sociology, economics, demography and historiography.
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