Ibn Khaldun Meets Timur
The Islamic Golden AgeA Theory Written in a Hilltop Castle
Born in Tunis in 1332, Ibn Khaldun spent thirty years being hired, jailed and dismissed by the courts of North Africa and Granada. Then he hid from politics in a castle at Qal'at Ibn Salama, in modern Algeria, and drafted the Muqaddimah - in about five months, he says, finishing in 1377 - then revised it until he died. Its engine is asabiyya, the solidarity that lets a hard, cohesive group take a rich, soft state, and that thins as their grandchildren inherit the palace without the bond. He put the usual limit at three generations, a generation being some forty years: roughly 120 years, give or take. None of it came from nowhere. Ptolemy's climate zones, Greek philosophy in Arabic dress, Persian statecraft manuals and the Arab chroniclers he read closely and then attacked for credulity are all in it.
Down the Wall
In late 1400 the Mamluk sultan Faraj marched to Syria with his court, Ibn Khaldun among it, to fight Timur - a Barlas amir out of Transoxiana who had already sacked Delhi. The Mamluk army was beaten outside the walls, and word reached Faraj of a plot against him at home. On the night of 7 January 1401 his army slipped out of Damascus and rode for Cairo, leaving the place to bargain for itself. In the Umayyad Mosque the argument over surrender turned to uproar. At dawn Ibn Khaldun went to the judges at the gate and asked to be let out, or lowered down. They refused him; later that morning they put him over the wall on ropes. He was sixty-eight. Almost everything we know about what happened next comes from what he himself wrote afterwards.
Thirty-Five Days in the Camp
He found Timur reclining on an elbow while food was carried past, and spoke through an interpreter, the Khwarazmian jurist Abd al-Jabbar ibn al-Numan, having no Turkic or Persian himself. His gifts were a fine one-volume Qur'an, a prayer rug, a copy of al-Busiri's Burda, and four boxes of good Cairene sweets, which he says were opened and handed round on the spot. He stayed about thirty-five days. Working from the manuscripts, the historian Walter Fischel counted six recurring subjects: the Maghrib, heroes of history, predictions of things to come, the Abbasid caliphate, safe conduct for himself and his companions, and whether he meant to stay. Timur commissioned a description of the whole Maghrib - mountains, rivers, villages, cities - and had the report translated into Mongol.
The Flatterer and His Own Rule
By his own account he rehearsed what to say. Frightened, he composed speeches designed to exalt Timur and then delivered them: that he had wanted this meeting for thirty or forty years, that no king since Adam was Timur's equal. He also relayed the astrological talk current in the Muslim West that a world-shaking figure was due, born in the decade of Timur's own traditional birth date. The awkwardness is precise. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun had catalogued the causes of falsehood in history, and one of them is the wish to flatter rulers. The encounter survives essentially in his telling alone, in a version shaped for readers back west. He is at once our best witness and an interested one.
Did Timur Prove Him Right?
The mission failed. Timur's men took the citadel, stripped the city and fired it; the blaze reached the Umayyad Mosque and melted the lead off its roof. Ibn Khaldun rode for Cairo in March 1401 and was robbed on the way. Whether Timur confirmed the theory is less tidy than the pairing suggests: he was no desert chief but ruled through puppet Chinggisid khans, married into that line for the title of son-in-law, and paid a mixed army out of the plunder his campaigns sent back to Samarkand. His empire did split apart within years of his death in 1405. Ibn Khaldun outlived him by some thirteen months, dying in Cairo in March 1406, chief Maliki judge for the sixth time. Later readers call him a founder of sociology; he thought he was giving historians a tool for catching lies.
Key Dates to Remember
- 1332 — Ibn Khaldun is born in Tunis, into a family of Andalusi exiles serving the Hafsid court.
- 1377 — He finishes the first draft of the Muqaddimah at Qal'at Ibn Salama, and keeps reworking it for the rest of his life.
- January 1401 — Sultan Faraj's army abandons Damascus by night; the judges lower Ibn Khaldun over the wall on ropes and he reaches Timur's camp.
- March 1401 — Timur's troops storm the citadel and sack Damascus, gutting the Umayyad Mosque; Ibn Khaldun, already released, is robbed on the road to Cairo.
- 17 March 1406 — Ibn Khaldun dies in Cairo, about thirteen months after Timur, holding the Maliki chief judgeship for the sixth time.