Ibn Khaldūn

"This work is essentially a legal opinion, a fatwa, asserting the inherent validity of the Sufi path"--

The Muqaddimah, often translated as "Introduction" or "Prolegomenon," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldūn, this work laid down the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. This first complete English translation was published in three volumes in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series.