The fame of Ibn Khaldūn in modern scholarship is due to his writing of the Muqaddimah, or “Introduction” to his History of the world, “Kitāb al-‘Ibar.” In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldūn laid the foundations of a new science, ‘Ilm al-‘Umrān, or, the science of human social organization. He, thus, preceded in his theories those of modern sociologists, philosophers, economists and historians like: Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Comte, Durkheim and even Marx.
The Muqaddimah has been translated into some twenty languages and hundreds of books and articles have been written, and still are, about Ibn Khaldūn and his ingenious work. Frantz Rosenthal states in the introduction to his English translation of the Muqaddimah: “ As it is, we can hardly do better than to state simply that here was a man with a great mind, who combined action with thought, the heir of a great civilization that had run its course, and the inhabitant of a country with a living historical tradition—albeit reduced to remnants of its former greatness— who realized his own gifts and the opportunities of his historical position in a work that ranks as one of mankind’s important triumphs”—P. lxxxvii.