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Concept
Muqaddimah
Summary
The Muqaddimah (مقدّمة "Introduction"), also known as the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (مقدّمة ابن خلدون) or Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena (Προλεγόμενα), is a book written by the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which presents a view of universal history. Some modern thinkers view it as the first work dealing with the social sciences of sociology, demography, and cultural history. The Muqaddimah also deals with Islamic theology, historiography, the philosophy of history, economics, political theory, and ecology. It has also been described as a precursor or an early representative of social Darwinism, and Darwinism.
Ibn Khaldun wrote the work in 1377 as the introduction and the first book of his planned work of world history, the Kitab al-ʿIbar ("Book of Lessons"; full title: Kitābu l-ʻibari wa Dīwāni l-Mubtada' wal-Ḥabar fī ayāmi l-ʻarab wal-ʿajam wal-barbar, waman ʻĀsarahum min Dhawī sh-Shalṭāni l-Akbār, i.e.: "Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the history of the Arabs and Foreigners and Berbers and their Powerful Contemporaries"), but already in his lifetime it became regarded as an independent work on its own.
Muqaddimah (مُقَدِّمَة) is an Arabic word used to mean "prologue" or "introduction", to introduce a larger work.
Ibn Khaldun wrote the first version of the Muqaddimah in Qalʿat ibn Salama, where he secluded himself for almost four years after withdrawing from political life. It is the first of three parts of a project he worked on for almost thirty years: his Kitab al-ʿIbar, a massive work of universal history filling seventeen volumes of 500 pages each in its modern edition. A draft of the Muqaddimah was completed in 1377. Manuscripts of the Muqaddimah copied in the lifetime of Ibn Khaldun of the Muqaddimah are extant, and a number of them have autographed marginal notes or additions.
In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun expounds on a "new science" around which he had maintained secrecy up until his retirement to Qalʿat ibn Salama, a new science for the study of what he calls "ʿumrān" (عُمران).
Official source
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