ABSTRACT
Abū Zayd ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥadramī 1 was born in Tunis in 732/1332 and died in Cairo in 808/1406 after having, five years earlier, met Tīmūr (Tamerlane) outside the walls of Damascus. A contemporary of the Merinids in Morocco, the Banū ‘Abd al-Wādid in the central Maghreb (Algeria), the Ḥafṣids in Ifriqiya (Tunisia), the Naṣirids in Granada and the Mamluks in Egypt, he was acquainted with all these regimes and lived in their respective courts. His different jobs within the sphere of these political powers gave him a valuable asset: they allowed him to experience the political game in the Muslim West and have direct contact with the tribal world in north-western Africa. From these two sets of experiences he drew theoretical consequences of tremendous importance broadly outlined in his Muqaddimah (“Prolegomena”). His whole life can be broadly divided into two main phases: the period in the Muslim West and the Egyptian phase. Two predominant events affected his life during the first period: the Black Death (748–9/1348–9) which had taken most of his teachers and particularly his own parents; and the assassination of his friend and competitor Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb in 774/1374.
