Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldūn

Abstract

This essay has to do mainly with the economics of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), historian and statesman of prominent Arab descent and medieval Islam's greatest economist, who spent most of his stormy life in northwest Africa and Egypt, engaged either in scholarly undertakings or in judicial and other governmental activities. His economic opinions, apparently the most advanced of those expressed in medieval Islam, are to be found principally in The Muqaddimah, originally intended as an introduction to his history (Kitāb al-‘Ibar) of the Arab and Muslim world and its pre-Islamic antecedents, though finally transformed into an exposition of the sources of historical change at work in that world. The Muqaddimah, initially completed in 1377, continued to be corrected or added to until shortly before the author's death; though manuscript copies were numerous, it was not issued in printed form until in the 1850's.