In January of the year 1401 CE, the walls of Damascus were surrounded by the armies of Timur, whom the Persians called Timur-i-Lang, the lame Timur, and whom Europe would come to know as Tamerlane. Timur was a Chagatai Turkic warrior from Central Asia who claimed descent from Genghis Khan and who had already burned Baghdad, sacked Delhi, defeated the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I at Ankara, and killed an estimated seventeen million people across a career of conquest. He was now camped outside Damascus. The city was about to fall.
Inside the walls of Damascus was Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, Maliki chief judge of Cairo, sixty-nine years old, the greatest living Muslim historian, and, at this moment, a man in a trap. He had been sent to Damascus by the Mamluk Sultan Faraj at the head of the Mamluk delegation that was supposed to defend Syria. The Sultan had panicked and returned to Cairo. Ibn Khaldun and the notables of Damascus were left to negotiate.
Ibn Khaldun did not want to be there. He was an old man. His body was weak. He had already served the courts of Tunis, Fez, Granada, and Cairo. He had already written the Muqaddima. He wanted to be back in his study in Cairo. Instead he was inside a besieged city facing the greatest conqueror since Genghis Khan.
Timur sent word into the city that he wished to meet Ibn Khaldun. He had heard of the Muqaddima. He was curious about a scholar who wrote about the rise and fall of dynasties like Timur's. He wanted to talk to him.
Ibn Khaldun had to think. If he went out and Timur was angry, he would be killed. If he refused to go, Timur would take the city by storm. If he went out and Timur was pleased, he might be able to save the city. He chose to go.
He was lowered by rope over the city wall on the twelfth of January. He was met by Timurid guards and taken to Timur's tent. The tent was pitched on a rise outside Damascus. It was the tent of a nomad emperor. Timur himself was sitting in it, leg extended because of his injury, the lame leg. He was sixty-four years old.
The two men greeted each other. Ibn Khaldun recorded the entire conversation in his autobiography, al-Ta'rif, and it is one of the more extraordinary documents in Islamic literary history. It is a scholar meeting the destroyer of his civilization face to face, taking notes.
Timur asked about the Maghreb. Ibn Khaldun described the tribes, the mountains, the pastoral economy, the political dynasties, the trade routes, all in the language of his own science. Timur was fascinated. He asked for a written report. Ibn Khaldun promised to prepare one.
Timur asked about the Muqaddima. Had Ibn Khaldun really written a book that explained how dynasties rise and fall? Ibn Khaldun said yes, and summarized the argument. He explained asabiyya, the group solidarity that a rural or Bedouin population possesses and that an urban population loses. He explained the cycle of four generations: the first generation founds the dynasty on tribal solidarity; the second consolidates it into a state; the third administers a mature bureaucracy; the fourth loses the solidarity, the economy weakens, and the dynasty falls. He explained that civilizations do not fall from outside but from within. Timur listened.
They talked for many hours over many days. Ibn Khaldun praised Timur, in the manner required at court. He compared him favorably to earlier conquerors. He was reasonable. Timur, who had killed millions, spared him.
But Timur also demanded a horse. Ibn Khaldun had ridden out of Damascus on a Egyptian mule. Timur wanted the mule. Ibn Khaldun let him have it. Timur eventually allowed Ibn Khaldun to leave. Ibn Khaldun rode back to Cairo on a borrowed mount.
Damascus fell. Timur sacked it. Timur's troops burned the Umayyad Mosque. Damascus was left in ruins.
Ibn Khaldun made it back to Cairo. He continued to serve as chief judge. He revised the Muqaddima. He died five years later, in Cairo, in 1406 CE.
What the story teaches. A scholar who understands why empires fall is sitting across from a man who is causing an empire to fall. Ibn Khaldun did not write a treatise arguing with Timur. He described the reality, took his notes, wrote his autobiography, and lived to revise the Muqaddima. The book was more important than any individual argument in the tent. Ibn Khaldun understood that his real audience was six centuries wide, and that if the book survived, so would the truth he was writing. The Muqaddima did survive. It was rediscovered by European scholars in the nineteenth century. It is now read in every serious university course on the philosophy of history. Timur died six years after that conversation. The Muqaddima is still being read.