Ibn Khaldun and the Revelation From the Desert
'The entire world is trifling and futile' wrote Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Muslim to whom history taught the fragility of political power and the recurrent cycle of achievement and decline within the social order.
Tacitus, the historian of the Roman Empire, would have recognised his kinship with the fourteenth-century North African historian, Ibn Khaldun, who also made the moral tension at the heart of imperial rule the centre of his history of the Islamic Empire.
It is now 1400 years since the birth of the Prophet Muhammed in Mecca, where, in a cave outside the city, in AD 610 he received the first of his divine revelations which together make up the Koran. Although Mecca was a trade centre, and focus of pilgrimage to the Kaba and the sacred idols of its shrine, Muhammed was also familiar with the stony wilderness of the Arabian deserts. Almost destitute nomads wandered across this harsh world in a complex tangle of clans, loosely held together by the intense kinship demands that result from what Ibn Khaldun was to call asabiya – the power of their group consciousness and by the imperious duty of the blood feud.
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