Ibn Khaldun (27 May 1332 – 17 March 1406, 732–808 AH) was an Arab scholar, historian, philosopher, and sociologist. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages, and is considered by a number of scholars to be a major forerunner of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography studies. His best-known book is the Muqaddimah or Prolegomena ("Introduction"), which he wrote in six months as he states in his autobiography. It later influenced 17th-century and 19th-century Ottoman historians such as Kâtip Çelebi, Mustafa Naima and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who used its theories to analyze the growth and decline of the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Khaldun interacted with Tamerlane, the founder of the Timurid Empire.
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