Ibn Khaldun 14th Century Arab Libertarian

Often in the West we are given to believing the portrait painted by the media of the Middle East as a unitary Islamic culture, one that has no liberal traditions and is under the dominant authority of the Mullahs. I had not heard of Ibn Khaldun before and so I googled him he fits well within the liberal tradition, indeed in modern terms he can be seen as a precursor to both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. His major life work can be defined as a Universal History of the Politcal Economy Arab world, It is a Sociology of Economics. In fact his work is reminicent of the later works of Spencer, Weber and Veblen.