Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun was an Arab scholar, historian, philosopher and sociologist, born in 1332 and died in 1406, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages and considered by a number of scholars to be a major forerunner of historiography, sociology, economics and demography. His best known book is the Muqaddimah, or Prolegomena, which he wrote in six months by his own account in his autobiography and which later influenced seventeenth and nineteenth century Ottoman historians including Katip Celebi, Mustafa Naima and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha in analyzing the growth and decline of the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Khaldun interacted personally with Tamerlane, the founder of the Timurid Empire, and has been called one of the most prominent Muslim and Arab scholars and historians; his work has since been compared to that of later European philosophers including Niccolo Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, as well as economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith, suggesting his ideas anticipated theirs without direct influence, and he has also been influential on modern Islamic thinkers of the traditionalist school.