Wali al-Din Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was born in Tunis to a family of Andalusian descent and spent his career as adviser, judge, and emissary at courts across the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Politically exhausted, in 1375 he withdrew to Qal'at ibn Salama in the Algerian interior; over four years he wrote the introduction to his world history Kitab al-Ibar — the Muqaddimah. The book is not a foreword bolted on later; it is a theoretical work in its own right.

At its centre is the concept of asabiyya — the solidarity, kinship, and shared purpose that binds a group from within. Ibn Khaldun observes that asabiyya is naturally strong in nomadic (bedouin) societies and is the force by which a dynasty rises to power. But power draws rulers into settled life, luxury, and elaborate taxation; asabiyya thins; within three or four generations the dynasty weakens and is replaced by a new nomadic group with fresher solidarity. The cycle, he argues, is not the contingency of history but its law.

The Muqaddimah also contains a strikingly modern economic analysis: it argues that tax revenues first rise and then fall as rates climb, that production rests on the division of labour, and that the value of money is tied to labour — four centuries before Adam Smith. The work was translated and taught in the Ottoman world by Pirizade and Cevdet Pasha; when Sylvestre de Sacy introduced it to Europe in the nineteenth century, it shaped Comte, Toynbee, and Gellner. It is the first major text of the philosophy of history and of sociology to come from the Islamic world.