[1] Some modern thinkers view it as the first work dealing with the social sciences of sociology,[2][3] demography,[citation needed] and cultural history.

[12][15][16] This new science, ʿilm al-ʿumrān (عِلم العُمران), is based on Greco-Arab philosophy and seeks to study the evolution of humankind and society throughout history using a method that is essentially historical, empirical, rational, and demonstrative.

ʿAlī Ibn al-Azraq (d. 1496) is apparently the only contemporary writer of the Maghreb who clearly approved of his work, quoting from it abundantly in his Badāʾiʿ al-silk fī ṭabāʾiʿ al-mulk[17] (كتاب بدائع السلك في طبائع الملك).

[12] In the following centuries, Khaldun appeared prominently, described as an authority on political history, in numerous biographical dictionaries—especially in Ahmed Muhammad al-Maqqari's Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb  [ar]—but the Muqaddimah remained largely absent.

[12] Ottoman historians including Kâtip Çelebi (d. 1657) and Mustafa Naima (d. 1716) valued the social and political theories in the Muqaddimah, but did not apply them in the analysis of their own society.

[19] Abdesselam Cheddadi concludes that "the strictly scientific contribution of Ibn Khaldūn to the field of history and the social sciences was not fully recognised in the Muslim world until the late nineteenth century.

[12] In 1858, the year following the first publication in Cairo, Étienne-Marc Quatremère printed an edition of the Arabic text of the Muqaddimah in three volumes in Paris under the title Les Prolégomènes d’Ebn Khaldoun.

[18][20] The concept of "ʿasabiyyah" (Arabic: "tribalism, clanism, communitarism", or in a modern context, "group feeling", "social cohesion", "solidarity" or even "nationalism") is one of the best known aspects of the Muqaddimah.

He 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.

Laffer does not claim to have invented the concept himself, noting that the idea was present in the work of Ibn Khaldun and, more recently, John Maynard Keynes.

The development of modern historical writing seems to have gained considerably in speed and substance through the utilization of a Muslim Literature which enabled western historians, from the seventeenth century on, to see a large section of the world through foreign eyes.

[2] Dawood writes on the Muqaddimah: It can be regarded as the earliest attempt made by any historian to discover a pattern in the changes that occur in man's political and social organization.

Rational in its approach, analytical in its method, encyclopaedic in detail, it represents an almost complete departure from traditional historiography, discarding conventional concepts and cliches and seeking, beyond the mere chronicle of events, an explanation—and hence a philosophy of history.

Besides al-Maqrizi (1364–1442),[30] Ibn Khaldun's focused attempt systematically to study and account for biases in the creation of history wouldn't be seen again until Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche[citation needed] in 19th-century Germany, and Arnold J. Toynbee, a 20th-century British historian.

[citation needed] Ibn Khaldun also examines why, throughout history, it has been common for historians to sensationalize historical events and, in particular, exaggerate numerical figures: Whenever contemporaries speak about the dynastic armies of their own or recent times, and whenever they engage in discussions about Muslim or Christian soldiers, or when they get to figuring the tax revenues and the money spent by the government, the outlays of extravagant spenders, and the goods that rich and prosperous men have in stock, they are quite generally found to exaggerate, to go beyond the bounds of the ordinary, and to succumb to the temptation of sensationalism.

In regards to jurisprudence, he acknowledged the inevitability of change in all aspects of a community, and wrote: The conditions, customs and beliefs of peoples and nations do not indefinitely follow the same pattern and adhere to a constant course.

[33]Ibn Khaldun further described Fiqh jurisprudence as "knowledge of the rules of God which concern the actions of persons who own themselves bound to obey the law respecting what is required (wajib), forbidden (haraam), recommended (mandūb), disapproved (makruh) or merely permitted (mubah)".

The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and reflect.

The Muqaddimah also states in Chapter 6: We explained there that the whole of existence in (all) its simple and composite worlds is arranged in a natural order of ascent and descent, so that everything constitutes an uninterrupted continuum.

He believed that the black skin, practices, and customs of the people of sub-Saharan Africa were due to the region's hot climate, a theory that according to Rosenthal may have been influenced by the Greek geographical ideas expounded by Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos.

[37] Shoaib Ahmed Malik has argued that Ibn Khaldun's theory, while remarkable for its acceptance of the kinship between monkeys and humans, should be understood in the context of the late antique and medieval concept of the great chain of being.

[38] The system of the great chain of being implies a graded similarity between the various stages in the hierarchy from minerals to plants, animals, humans, angels, and God, but not a temporal process in which one species originates from the other.

While according to some mystical interpretations individual souls may move up the 'ladder' in order to reunite with the divine, the species (or 'substantial forms', in the language of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ontology) themselves are eternal and fixed.

[40] The quote is taken from a section called The Real Meaning of Prophecy, which argues that prophets occupy a place in the great chain of being just beneath angels.

In Ibn Khaldun's view, this explains why individual prophets may temporarily ascend to the rank of angels and share with them in the knowledge of the divine, which they may then bring back to humanity in the form of revelation.

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.

[43] He 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",[42] 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".

He 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.

The glue which holds such tribes together and eventually forms "royal authority" or the state[citation needed], according to Ibn Khaldun, is ʿasabiyyah.

The British philosopher-anthropologist Ernest Gellner considered Ibn Khaldun's definition of government, "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself", the best in the history of political philosophy.