Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a pioneering Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demography, and culture — all of which we now treat as separate disciplines — into a “universal history”.
At the outset of his justly famous study, Khaldun put his finger on something fundamental about why people look to the past. The whole purpose of studying history, he argued, was to allow both the historian and their reader to approach the “inner meaning” of events and decisions.
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