The Muqaddimah

⚖The case for it

Written in the 1370s, the chapter on taxation argues that “excessive taxation reduces revenue,” rates climbing until they strangle the economy paying them, which readers find startling to meet in a fourteenth-century manuscript. Asabiyyah, the group solidarity that builds dynasties and then dissolves as they get comfortable, is the durable idea, and readers apply it to modern states without being prompted. One reader calls it “a complete library in this genius's mind,” history, economics, education, crafts and social psychology moving as if the categories had not been invented yet. Another flatly names it the “first book written on sociology,” and a third reports it “changed many things in me.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

It reads like lecture notes rather than a finished treatise, one critic calling it “repetitive, clumsy in places, maddeningly inexplicit.” Readers arriving without Islamic history report getting lost in the apparatus and wanting a companion volume nobody told them to buy, one preferring to “read modern historians citing Khaldun instead.” The chapters refuting alchemy and cataloguing divination hold historical interest and little else. His environmental determinism about sub-Saharan Africans and his matter-of-fact treatment of slavery sit badly beside the praise for his social theory, and readers name it directly. Rosenthal runs three volumes, one reader dismissing it outright as “too old to be of use, too difficult to translate,” while the Dawood abridgement cuts more than some readers accept.

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings