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In January 2015, Facebook’s cofounder Mark Zuckerberg launched A Year of Books, a Facebook page dedicated to reading and discussing books that emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.
The recommendations up till now had been for mostly modern books. But the latest, the 11th, was the Muqaddimah, written in 1377 by the Arab Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun.
On his personal Facebook page, Zuckerberg described this latest book club selection:
"It's a history of the world written by an intellectual who lived in the 1300s. It focuses on how society and culture flow, including the creation of cities, politics, commerce and science. While much of what was believed then is now disproven after 700 more years of progress, it's still very interesting to see what was understood at this time and the overall worldview when it's all considered together."
But who is Ibn Khaldun?
Ibn Khaldun is considered the most prominent figure in the fields of history and sociology in Muslim history.
His name is Abdurahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun. His ancestry, according to him, originated from Hadhramaut, in the eastern coastal region of Yemen.
He was born in Tunisia in 1332 to a wealthy Andalusian family. He memorized the Qur’an by heart at a young age and was educated in the studies of hadith (prophetic sayings), grammar, rhetoric, poetry, jurisprudence and law, as well as in sciences such as physics, mathematics, logic and philosophy.
His strong base in a wide variety of disciplines would help shape his understanding of the world and the way he analyzed it.
Early in his adult life, he held a number of minor clerical posts across North Africa. When he was offered a job in Granada in Andalusia (now Spain) in 1364, he seized the opportunity. He worked there as a successful diplomat for the government of Granada, working out a peace treaty between Granada and neighboring Christian states. Political intrigue, however, led him to abandon his post and move back to Africa, where he compiled his Muqaddimah.
Encyclopedic Muqaddimah
Muqaddimah in Arabic means The Introduction. The book was an early attempt to filter history from biases and to find universal elements in the progression of humanity.
Ibn Khaldun's novel scientific approach to history established him as one of the foundational thinkers of modern sociology and historiography.
No one in the history of economic thought has established such a coherent general economic theory to explain and predict the rise and the fall of civilizations, nations and empires as Ibn Khaldun has formulated in his “Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History”. His theory has the empirical and theoretical power not only to explain the consequences of government policies on production and trade, investment and specialization, but to predict the very survival of the state.
The monumental work of the Muqaddimah is hard to categorize. This is because, beside history and sociology, the Muqaddimah was replete with religion, psychology, education and economics.
For Ibn Khaldun, the best state is the one that has the minimum bureaucracy, minimum mercenary army to keep law and order, and minimum taxation on its citizens to finance the activities of the state.
The 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, famously stated in 1993,
“May I offer you the advice of the 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who said: ‘At the beginning of the empire, the tax rates were low and the revenues were high. At the end of the empire, the tax rates were high and the revenues were low.’”
Although one may agree or disagree with the conservative economic policies of Ronald Reagan, there is no denying the genius of the man he is quoting who was centuries ahead of his time.
Ibn Khaldun’s ideas about finding a balance in taxation that leads to higher revenues later became known as the Laffer Curve. The Laffer Curve is used by economists today to determine the perfect taxation rate to produce the most government revenue. The curve is named after American economist Arthur Laffer, who does not claim to have invented the idea. He made clear that he got the idea from Ibn Khaldun, saying:
“The Laffer Curve, by the way, was not invented by me. For example, Ibn Khaldun, a 14th century Muslim philosopher, wrote in his work the Muqaddimah: ‘It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.’”
Source : http://www.onislam.net
