23 Facts About Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, known as the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena (Ancient Greek: ), is a book written by the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which records an early view of universal history.

Muqaddimah is an Arabic word used to mean "Prologue" or "The Introduction", to introduce a larger work.

Muqaddimah explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of great empires and use the unity presented by those areas to their advantage in order to bring about a change in leadership.

Muqaddimah noted macroeconomic forces of population growth, human capital development, and technological developments effects on development.

Muqaddimah understood that money served as a standard of value, a medium of exchange, and a preserver of value, though he did not realize that the value of gold and silver changed based on the forces of supply and demand.

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Muqaddimah described labor as the source of value, necessary for all earnings and capital accumulation, obvious in the case of craft.

Muqaddimah argued that even if earning "results from something other than a craft, the value of the resulting profit and acquired must ( ) include the value of the labor by which it was obtained.

Muqaddimah understood that when a good is scarce and in demand, its price is high and when the good is abundant, its price is low.

Muqaddimah "argued that high taxes were often a factor in causing empires to collapse, with the result that lower revenue was collected from high rates.

Muqaddimah is held to be a foundational work for the schools of historiography, cultural history, and the philosophy of history.

The Muqaddimah laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history.

Muqaddimah states that history is a philosophical science, and historians should attempt to refute myths.

Muqaddimah emphasized the role of systemic bias in affecting the standard of evidence.

Muqaddimah was a jurist, and sometimes participated reluctantly in rulings that he felt were coerced, based on arguments he did not respect.

Muqaddimah contains discussions on Islamic theology which show that Ibn Khaldun was a follower of the orthodox Ash'ari school of Sunni Islamic thought and a supporter of al-Ghazali's religious views.

Muqaddimah was a critic of Neoplatonism, particularly its notion of a hierarchy of being.

Muqaddimah covers the historical development of kalam and the different schools of Islamic thought, notably the Mu'tazili and Ash'ari schools.

The Muqaddimah discusses the history of alchemy, the views of alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan, and the theories of the transmutation of metals and elixir of life.

Muqaddimah begins his refutation on social grounds, arguing that many alchemists are incapable of earning a living and end up "losing their credibility because of the futility of their attempts", and states that if transmutation were possible, the disproportionate growth of gold and silver "would make transactions useless and would run counter to divine wisdom".

Muqaddimah argues that some alchemists resort to fraud, either openly by applying a thin layer of gold on top of silver jewelry, or by secretly using an artificial procedure of covering whitened copper with sublimated mercury.

Muqaddimah ends his arguments with a restatement of his position: "Alchemy can only be achieved through psychic influences.

Muqaddimah argues that the best type of political community is a caliphate or Islamic state, and argues that the neo-Platonist political theories of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina and the "perfect state" are useless because God's Law, the sharia, has been revealed to take account of public interest and the afterlife.

Muqaddimah argues that if that is not possible for a ruler to be both loved and feared, then it is better to be loved, because fear creates many negative effects in the state's population.