The Orange Trees of Marrakesh: Ibn Khaldun and the Science of Man

An examination of Khaldun's Islamic history of the premodern world, its philosophical underpinnings, and the author himself.

In his masterwork Muqaddimah, the Arab Muslim Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a Tunisian descendant of Andalusian scholars and officials in Seville, developed a method of evaluating historical evidence that allowed him to identify the underlying causes of events. His methodology was derived from Aristotelian notions of nature and causation, and he applied it to create a dial...