The Polymath

This award-wining historical novel deals with the stormy life of the outstanding Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, using historical sources, and particularly material from the writer’s works, to construct the personal and intellectual universe of a fourteenth-century genius. The dominant concern of the novel – the uneasy relationship between intellectuals and political power, between scholar and authority – addresses our times through the transparent veil of history. We meet Ibn Khaldun as a man of the mind, a man of the heart, and finally as a man of action, trying to minimise the imminent horrors of invading armies and averting the sack of Damascus by Tamerlane, only to spend his last years lonely and destitute, having been fired from his posts as qadi, having his wife, and his attempts at the political situation having come to nil.