Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khald没n, The Muqaddimah, or 鈥淚ntroduction,鈥� is the earliest critical study of history. Though intended as the preface and first book of a world history, it is a wholly self-contained work, one that laid the foundations for fields of knowledge ranging from the philosophy of history to sociology and ethnography and has influenced writers such as Frank Herbert, Bruce Chatwin, and Naguib Mahfouz. A three-volume English translation by the eminent Islamicist Franz Rosenthal was first published in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series, garnering immediate international acclaim. A one-volume abridged version followed in 1969. Now the complete unabridged edition of Rosenthal鈥檚 masterful translation is available again in three beautiful volumes, reintroducing this monumental study of history to twenty-first century audiences.
Ibn Khald没n (1332–1406) was a prominent scholar, statesman, diplomat, and teacher, widely regarded as one of the greatest intellectuals in the history of the Arab world. Franz Rosenthal (1914–2003) was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic at Yale University.
“Ibn Khald没n, the great 14th-century Arab scholar, is the most authoritative and most beguiling of Arabic polymaths. . . . His learning and ideas have an astonishingly modern relevance. His encyclopaedic work is a wonderfully readable mixture of history, sociology, ethnography, economics, science, art, literature, cookery, and medicine.”—Iain Finlayson, Times
“[The] most remarkable book written during the entire Middle Ages, one of the great intellectual achievements of all time.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
“Undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place . . . the most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of how human affairs work that has been made anywhere.”—Arnold J. Toynbee, Observer
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