The 14th-century Tunisian polymath — historian, sociologist, economist, and political theorist — whose Muqaddimah (Introduction to History) articulated the first systematic theory of how and why civilizations rise and fall, introducing concepts of group solidarity (asabiyyah), economic analysis, and the sociology of knowledge that anticipate by four centuries ideas usually credited to the European Enlightenment and social science traditions.
In 1377, in a remote mountain fortress in what is now Algeria, a 45-year-old Arab scholar wrote the Muqaddimah in five months. He was trying to write a history of the Islamic world, but he realized first he needed a theory of history itself — how civilizations emerge, consolidate, and collapse. What he wrote was 900 years ahead of its time: a sociology of group solidarity, a theory of economic cycles, an analysis of how rulers extract wealth until they kill the productive base, and a philosophy of historical knowledge. He had invented a new science. He called it ilm al-umran — the science of human civilization.