The social history of Ibn Khaldun, Arabic text
al-Muqaddima: This edition of al-Muqaddima (Arabic) checked against seven different editions. Al-Muqaddima is Ibn Khaldun’s introduction to Kitab al-Ibar (The Book of Lessons and the Record of Beginnings and News in the Days of the Arabs, Persians, and Berbers and Their Contemporaries of the Greatest Sultans) and it quickly became the most important book in Ibn Khaldun’s body of works. Al-Muqaddima can be summarized as a set of foundational theories that Ibn Khaldun established for the study of human civilization, al-hadara, as he called it and assumed that civilization is not affected by singular individual events and ideas but rather by societies. Ibn Khaldun found that these laws can be applied to societies living in different times, for example, an agricultural society is the same agricultural society centuries removed or at any time in history. What we will are discovering about Ibn Khaldun’s work is him being a systems thinker, one who held that human beings are the outcome of their circumstances and their natural and manmade systems they live by.
A new translation of the section: al-Muqaddima, al-Ma`ash–English and Arabic Texts is available in print as well.
Digital editions from other publishers are archived here:
