Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a scholar, most unique in the Islamic world. He is considered one of the most significant thinkers of the pre-modern Muslim world. Many scholars have described him as being the first modern Muslim thinker. His most substantial work is the Kitab al Ibar, a historical account of the Arabs and the Berbers and also contains the Muqaddima or Prolegomenon, which consists of what he calls, the ‘science of human society (ilm al-ijtima al insani) or human social organization (ilm al-umran al-bashari). While it is claimed by some that Ibn Khaldun’s ideas had very little impact on the development of Muslim thought for many centuries, he remained highly valued by many European thinkers from the nineteenth century onwards, many of whom regarded him as the progenitor of sociology and modern science.
With the recent criticism by postcolonial studies and other related academic studies, of Eurocentrism and its exclusion of non-western thinkers and thought from the dominant discourse of knowledge, Syed Farid Alatas’s book on Ibn Khaldun is a timely contribution to the debate.