Ibn Khaldun and the Muqaddimah

A Tunisian official, sick of politics, retreated to a castle in the Algerian hills and wrote an introduction to a history of the world that turned into something else: an attempt to explain why dynasties rise and fall at all. His answer was asabiyyah — group solidarity. Hard peoples from the margins have it, conquer soft cities, grow comfortable over about four generations, lose it, and are conquered by the next hard people. He argued history should be examined for underlying causes rather than recited as a list of kings, and criticized earlier historians for repeating what they were told.