IBN KHALDUN (1332-1406) WAS A PIONEERING Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demography, and culture — all of which we now treat as separate disciplines — into a “universal history”.
At the outset of his justly famous study, Khaldun put his finger on something fundamental about why people look to the past. The whole purpose of studying history, he argued, was to allow both the historian and their reader to approach the “inner meaning” of events and decisions.
Doing so necessitated informed “speculation” about “causes and origins”, as well as “deep knowledge” of “the how and why”. Khaldun was unequivocal about what this amounted to. History was, he concluded, “firmly rooted in philosophy”. Indeed, he went further still: “it deserves to be treated as a branch of philosophy”.
Even centuries later, this remains a striking statement. To many modern historians, the notion that history is a branch of philosophy will sound alien. Yet Khaldun was making a crucial point. He knew that reflecting seriously on the past hones our grasp of psychology and human
