The Muqaddimah:An Introduction to History. Ibn Khaldun (Abridged Edition)
By Ibn Khaldûn
Translated and introduced by Franz Rosenthal
Edited and abridged by N.J. Dawood
Paperback 504 Pages 
Published by Princeton University Press, USA

The Muqaddimah, often translated as 'Introduction' or 'Prolegomenon,' is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldûn , this monumental work laid down the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter of Arabic literature Franz Rosenthal, was published in three volumes in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series and received immediate acclaim in America and abroad. A one-volume abridged version of Rosenthal's masterful translation was first published in 1969.
This new edition of the abridged version, with the addition of a key section of Rosenthal's own introduction to the three-volume edition, and with a new introduction by Bruce B. Lawrence, will reintroduce this seminal work to twenty-first-century students and scholars of Islam and of medieval and ancient history.

A masterpiece in literature on philosophy of history and sociology. The main theme of this monumental work was to identify psychological, economic, environmental and social facts that contribute to the advancement of human civilization and the currents of history. He analyzed the dynamics of group relationships and showed how group feelings, al-'Asabiyya, produce the ascent of a new civilization and political power. He identified an almost rhythmic repetition of the rise and fall in human civilization, and analyzed factors contributing to it.

This book should help in making the essential ideas of Ibn Khaldun accessible to the English speaking reader, despite distortions in the translation of some Islamic expressions.

Abu Zayd 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami (732 to 808 Hijri) was a famous Muslim historiographer and historian born in what is modern day Tunisia, and is sometimes seen as one of the forerunners of modern