Ibn khaldun an intellectual biography
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Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography
"In Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun has finally found a biographer and interpreter almost as versatile and learned as he was himself."—Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal
"A compelling new account of the 14th-century Arab historian and polymath. . . . Irwin has produced an exemplary work."—Gavin Jacobson, Financial Times
"As an introduction to Ibn Khaldun’s fascinating life and times, his ideas, and how they have been understood and misunderstood over the centuries, you could hardly wish for something better."—Thomas Small, Times Literary Supplement
"Irwin wears his immense erudition lightly and gives an often very funny account of how orientalists, historians and modern Arab nationalist have interpreted Ibn Khaldun’s most famous work. . . . Irwin offers his readers a superb work of intellectual recovery, one which presents Ibn Khaldun as a creature of his time. . . . He has resurrected for us the mediev
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Ibn Khaldun, the remarkable and profound fourteenth-century historical scholar, now benefits from a wide-ranging, readable, specific, and authoritative intellectual biography. Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in , studied in Fez, then served a lifetime as scholar, teacher, judge of Maliki lag, and pious Muslim who tyst followed the sufi path. At midlife he moved to a retreat and composed his great work on history and kultur in North Africa, the Muqaddimah, during the s. He then moved eastward to work in the Mamluk capital of Cairo, where he died in
The author of this biography fryst vatten a well-known scholar on the Mamluk state, also well known as a literary stylist. The blurbs indicate the high regard in which Robert Irwin fryst vatten held by his colleagues, labeling the book as “an exhilarating work of intellectual recovery” and “a masterful study of the outstanding visionary of Islamic civilization.” More specifically, one observer argues that Ibn Khaldun is shown to have been “authentically un
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Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography
Robert Irwin
Paperback
Ibn Khaldun (–) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world - a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas.
Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun's