Translate the text without a dictionary Summarize it.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 411.

The greatest Arab historian and one of the most penetrating think­ers about historiography in any time or place was undoubtedly Ibn Khaldun. The introduction to his Kitab al-'ibar, a universal history (begun in 1375), is, in A. J Toynbee's judgment (I934), "the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind." Ibn Khaldun had absorbed all the learning accessible to a Muslim of his time. He was a master of religious learning, an outstanding judge, a writer on logic. He turned a subtle and most disciplined mind to his­toriography in order to explain his personal tragedy. He had served a succession of rulers in Islamic Spain and the Maghrib (Northwest Af­rica) as a general, a politician, and even once as a chief minister, and his activities had always ended in disaster. In order to explain what had gone wrong, he sought to achieve a correct understanding of the forces that governed the societies known to him. He concluded that political stability had become impossible in his native Maghrib, be­cause over centuries economic prosperity had declined excessively and the forces of lawlessness had become too strong. He was the only Muslim historian to suggest social and economic reasons for histori­cal change.

As a detailed chronicler of events Ibn Khaldun is not always exact, but, like contemporary historians, he knew how to reconstruct cor­rectly the main trends over several centuries. His ability to formulate general laws that govern the fate of societies and to establish rules for the criticism of sources provided him with an intelligent framework for the correct reconstruction of past history.

Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah has survived in at least a score of manuscripts, but he has had no effective influence on Muslim histori­ography until recently (but his work, although widely read and cop­ied, remained without effective influence until the additional impetus of Western thought was introduced in the 19th century).