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Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Khaldoun (full name, Arabic ??? ??? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ????? ?, Abu Zayd ‘Abdu r-Ra?man bin Mu?ammad bin Khaldun) (May 27, 1332 AD/732 AH – March 19, 1406 AD/808 AH), was a famous historian, scholar, theologian, and statesman born in present-day Tunisia.[1] He is considered the forerunner of several social scientific disciplines demography,[2] cultural history,[3] historiography,[4] the philosophy of history,[5] sociology,[2][5][6] and modern economics.[7][8] He is sometimes considered to be a "father" of these disciplines, or even the social sciences in general,[9] for anticipating many elements of these disciplines centuries before they were founded. He is best known for his Muqaddimah (known as Prolegomenon in Greek), the first volume of his book on universal history, Kitab al-Ibar. Ibn Khaldun's life is relatively well-documented, as he wrote an autobiography ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ???? ????? (Al-Ta?rif bi Ibn-Khaldun wa Rihlatuhu Gharban wa Sharqan, published by Muhammad ibn-Tawit at-Tanji, Cairo 1951) in which numerous documents regarding his life are quoted word-for-word. However, the autobiography has little to say about his private life, so that little is known about his family background. Generally known as "Ibn Khaldun" after a remote ancestor, he was born in Tunis in 1332 C.E. (732 A.H.) into an upper-class Andalusian family, the Banu Khaldun. His family, which held many high offices in Andalusia, had emigrated to Tunisia after the fall of Seville to Reconquista forces around the middle of the 13th century. Under the Tunisian Hafsid dynasty some of his family held political office; Ibn Khaldun's father and grandfather however withdrew from political life and joined a mystical order. In his autobiography, Ibn Khaldun traces his descent back to the time of Muhammad through an Arab tribe from Yemen, specifically the Hadhramaut, which came to Spain in the eighth century at the beginning of the Islamic conquest. In his own words "And our ancestry is from Hadhramaut, from the Arabs of Yemen, via Wa'il ibn Hajar, from the best of the Arabs, well-known and respected." (p. 2429, Al-Waraq's edition). However, the biographer Mohammad Enan questions his claim, suggesting that his family may have been Berbers who pretended to be of Arab origin in order to gain social status.[10] According to Muhammad Hozien, "The false [Berber] identity would be valid however at the time that Ibn Khaldun’s ancestors left Andalusia and moved to Tunisia they did not change their claim to Arab ancestry. Even in the times when Berbers were ruling, the reigns of Al-Marabats and al-Mowahids, et al. The Ibn Khalduns did not reclaim their Berber heritage."[11] This would lend credence to his claim of Arab origin. His family's high rank enabled Ibn Khaldun to study with the best North African teachers of the time. He received a classical Arabic education, studying the Qur'an and Arabic linguistics, the basis for an understanding of the Qur'an, hadith, and fiqh. The mystic, mathematician and philosopher Al-Abili introduced him to mathematics, logic and philosophy, where he above all studied the works of Averroes, Avicenna, Razi and al-Tusi. At the age of 17, Ibn Khaldun lost both his parents to an epidemic of the plague which hit Tunis.
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