Muqaddima

The Muqaddima (Arab: rear RTL مقدّمة), or Al-Muqaddima ( Introduction to the universal history ), is a work of Ibn Khaldoun written in 1377 as the foreword of its first book of world history: the Book of the examples . However, she is then regarded as an independent work, of encyclopedic nature which includes the whole of knowledge of XIVe century of which geography, philosophy, history, economics, sociology, politics, town planning, medicine, and even sustainable development. Ibn Khaldoun used for this work all the written sources of the time: Greek, Byzantine, and Moslem.

It is about a Moslem attempt of universal Histoire. Ibn Khaldoun translates before the universal history of Paul Orose into Arabic to inform itself on the history gréco-Roman and Christian woman. It is about the one of the first works of Sociologie.

Plan

The plan of the Muqaddima (Prolégomènes) structure in the following way:

Introduction:

History like Science, definition of its object
Exposed principles of the historical intelligibility
Methodology of the critical historiography

I. general Sociology of civilization:

Science of the umran , theory of the natural sociability
Determinations of the Medium and their incidences Culture them, physical Geography and human
psychosociological and ethnological Considerations: prophecy, arts divinatoires

II. Sociology of the bedouinity ( badiya ):

Elements of a general Ethnology
Study of the two types of human grouping: bedouinity with the citadinity, exposed Psychology compared, Dialectical movement of a Geopolitical culture
: concept of asabiyya (cohesion and solidarity), base of a dynamics socio-policy

III. political Philosophy:

Establishment and exercise of the To be able ( mulk ) and of the spiritual authority ( khilafa )
Dynamique of the Dynastie S, theory of the institutions

IV. Sociology of the citadinity ( will hadara ):

urban Phenomenon
Organization of the political city
urban Economy
Typology of the townsman
Outcome of the asabiyya

V. Economy political:

human Industry
Work, Price, Speculation
Social classes

VI. Sociology of knowledge:

Classification of sciences (religious, rational, linguistic)
Language and company, acquisition of the language, Pedagogy
philosophical Disciplines and arts persons

Critical

Ibn Khaldoun begins the Muqaddima with a complete criticism of the errors regularly made by the Historien S contemporaries and the difficulties which await the historian in his work. It notes 7 errors:

“All the writings, by their nature even, are error prone…

… partiality in a faith or an opinion…
… the excess of confidence in a single source…
… the incapacity to include/understand what is foreseeable…
… an erroneous belief in the truth…
… the incapacity to place an event in its true context…
… the common desire to gain the favor of those of the raised rows, by congratulating them, by diffusing their fame…
… most important is the ignorance of the laws which control the transformation of the human society”.

Against the seventh and the last not, Ibn Khaldoun presents its theory of the human society.

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