Ibn Khaldūn always proceeds from the general which is consistently presumed in theory towards the specific phenomenon, which thus acquires its tangible quality. As the aim of his work is the intellectual building up of an independent, hitherto undescribed civilisation, cumrān – the concept of culture/civilisation in the broadest sense – understandably occupies an important place in his scheme of categories. Intellectual and material phases are even more closely interdependent in this category, although civilisation, strictly speaking, hadhāra, no doubt plays an ever more definite role in this compound concept.1 We can only conclude that in the process of the "settling down" of Islam (in Ibn Khaldūn ijtimac, later "society", means that at most), the prophetic age represented culture in the combined concept and that in later times it played the part of a hegemony in camouflage. In the world of every day, the movement of cumrān was naturally from the simpler form, cumrān badawī (that mainly determined on the steppe by the Bedouin), towards urban civilisation or cumrān hadhārī. In Ibn Khaldūn, however – as in the way that, six hundred years later, Marx described his similar method in the foreword to his famous Introduction of 18572 – the process of depiction and intellectual reconstruction are the opposite of that, because the simple, the yet undeveloped, can be grasped from the advanced, the complicated which has acquired its own definition of form, although depiction has to disrupt the real movement of history and proceed from the simple towards the complicated (in fact, after the geographical introduction, this is the subject of the basic second chapter).