Ibn Khaldun and the Revelation From the Desert
Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on The Historian as Philopsoher. 'The entire world is trifling and futile' wrote Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Muslim to whom history taught the fragility of political power and the recurrent cycle of achievement and decline within the social order.
Tacitus, the historian of the Roman Empire, would have recognised his kinship with the fourteenth-century North African historian, Ibn Khaldun, who also made the moral tension at the heart of imperial rule the centre of his history of the Islamic Empire.
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