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The Historian Who Studied the Rise and Fall of Power: Ibn Khaldun and the Science of Civilization
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 18 2026
Pages: 122
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In January 1401, an old scholar was lowered over the walls of besieged Damascus in a woven basket - down into the camp of the most feared conqueror alive.
His name was Ibn Khaldun. He was nearly seventy years old. And he had spent his entire life studying exactly this moment: the instant when an old, comfortable order meets a new and hungrier power sweeping in from beyond its borders.
He did not learn this from books. He lived it.
By the time he faced Tamerlane, Ibn Khaldun had already survived the Black Death that killed both of his parents in a single year. He had spent twenty-two months in a Fez prison on suspicion of treason. He had negotiated a peace treaty with a Christian king who offered to restore his family's lost Spanish estates - and turned him down. He had served, and been discarded by, half a dozen rival dynasties across North Africa and Spain. And in 1384, he lost his wife and daughters when their ship sank off Alexandria, carrying with them the personal library he had built across a lifetime of scholarship.
Out of this wreckage, in just a few months of solitude at a remote desert fortress, Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah - a work that would eventually be recognized as one of the founding texts of sociology, economics, and modern historical method, centuries before those disciplines had names.
The Historian Who Studied the Rise and Fall of Power tells the full story: the asabiyyah that binds a rising dynasty together and dissolves it within four generations: the six times he was appointed, and dismissed, as Cairo's chief judge: and the extraordinary weeks he spent in conversation with Tamerlane himself, watching his own theory of conquest and collapse play out in the flesh, in real time, outside the walls of a dying city.
Told in gripping, meticulously sourced narrative, this is the story of how one man's turbulent life became one of history's most enduring theories of power.
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