“Ibn Khaldūn is frequently called the world’s first sociologist. To use a phrase often applied to 19th-century European thinkers, he tried to uncover the ‘motor of history’. Hegel famously found this motor in the dialectical movement of ideas; Marx found it in the internal contradictions of the economic order. Ibn Khaldūn found it in the dynamics of al ‘așabiyyah, a term usually translated as “group-feeling,” “esprit de corps,” or “spirit of kinship.”
―
James V. Spickard,
Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes
