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Ibn Khaldun
- An Intellectual Biography
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
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Publisher's summary
The definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the Muqaddima
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world - a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas.
Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin describes how Ibn Khaldun's life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun's ideas often seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has often been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin's account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism.
In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time - a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an often-strange world quite different from our own.
Critic reviews
"A compelling new account of the 14th-century Arab historian and polymath.... Irwin has produced an exemplary work." (Gavin Jacobson, Financial Times)
"Irwin wears his immense erudition lightly and gives an often very funny account of how orientalists, historians, and modern Arab nationalist have interpreted Ibn Khaldun’s most famous work.... Irwin offers his readers a superb work of intellectual recovery, one which presents Ibn Khaldun as a creature of his time.... He has resurrected for us the medieval Muslim mind." (Francis Ghilès, The Spectator)
"In Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun has finally found a biographer and interpreter almost as versatile and learned as he was himself." (Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal)
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Here is the remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy, and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West. For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile, Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse.
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Missing history
- By Robert on 11-26-11
By: Jonathan Lyons
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Michelangelo, God's Architect
- The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece
- By: William E. Wallace
- Narrated by: Simon Callow
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering.
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Michelangelo, architect, urban designer, artist
- By Marco on 09-16-20
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No god but God
- The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
- By: Reza Aslan
- Narrated by: Shishir Kurup
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Though it is the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam remains shrouded by ignorance and fear. What is the essence of this ancient faith? Is it a religion of peace or war? How does Allah differ from the God of Jews and Christians? Can an Islamic state be founded on democratic values such as pluralism and human rights? A writer and scholar of comparative religions, Reza Aslan has earned international acclaim for the passion and clarity he has brought to these questions.
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Informative and Interesting!
- By Kate on 03-14-12
By: Reza Aslan
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Twelve Caesars
- Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Bollingen Series)
- By: Mary Beard
- Narrated by: Mary Beard
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book - against a background of today’s “sculpture wars” - Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the Western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars”, from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian.
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This foray into art history is a disappointment.
- By Stephen J Chiulli on 11-10-21
By: Mary Beard
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In God's Path
- The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire
- By: Robert G. Hoyland
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time.
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Islamic conquest history from the outside
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Destiny Disrupted
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- By: Tamim Ansary
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- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent, parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the world while ignoring the other. As Europeans colonized the globe, the two world histories intersected and the Western narrative drove the other one under. The West hardly noticed, but the Islamic world found the encounter profoundly disrupting.
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A history of the world before the West mattered
- By David on 05-05-14
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Lost Islamic History
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- By: Firas Alkhateeb
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social, and political forces in history. Over the last 1,400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities, and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia. Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists, and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen, and soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion and neglect some of these personalities and institutions.
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Excellent narration
- By Jamal on 06-19-22
By: Firas Alkhateeb
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Aristotle's Children
- How Christian, Muslims and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom
- By: Richard E. Rubenstein
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 13 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Richard E. Rubenstein brings the past to life in this engrossing story of social, religious, and scientific revolution during one of the darkest periods in European history. When a group of Dark Ages scholars rediscovered the works of Aristotle, the great thinker's ideas ignited a firestorm of enlightened thought. This is the endlessly fascinating account of the pivotal period in history when the modern era took root.
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Interesting story of the rediscovery of Aristotle
- By John on 12-16-04
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Slavery and Islam
- By: Jonathan A.C. Brown
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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What happens when authorities you venerate condone something you know is wrong? What does this mean about what you’ve been venerating? No issue brings this question into starker contrast than slavery. Every major religion and philosophy condoned or approved of it, but in modern times there is nothing seen as more evil. Americans confront this crisis of authority when they erect statues of Founding Fathers who slept with their slaves. And Muslims faced it when ISIS revived sex slavery, justifying it with verses from the Quran and the practice of Muhammad.
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A Bold and Broad Study of a Difficult Topic
- By Rob Squires on 02-21-20
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Ravenna
- Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe
- By: Judith Herrin
- Narrated by: Phyllida Nash
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminaries, becoming a true cultural and political capital.
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Worthy book, stingy production.
- By Stephen Chakwin on 12-13-20
By: Judith Herrin
What listeners say about Ibn Khaldun
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Josh G.
- 04-28-20
Disappointing
The author sets out to bulldoze the perhaps overblown and overrated Ibn Khaldun, yet concerns himself almost exclusively with trifles. Rather than an intellectual biography of Ibn Khaldun, we see something more akin to an exercise of the author's intllectual vanity. A great chunk of the book is concerned with Ibn Khaldun's pre-modern and highly idiosyncratic ideas, from his ignorance of meteorological phenomena, to his almost provincial turtling into religious handwaving to dismiss sophists and philosophers.
In a field crammed with praise for the man, the author somehow overstresses the goofier aspects of Ibn Khaldun's thought. A small and derisive tone pervades throughout. Ironically, for so much commentary on bad translations by others, the author deploys his own idiosyncratic (wrong) translation of Quran 17:16, a translation that states that god /commands/ the wealthy and powerful of the cities he wishes to destroy to do evil, when in fact no other version could I find renders the passage this way. Instead, every translation is to the effect that the elite are commanded to do /good/, yet continue to transgress. A bit embarrassing, really.
Rather than a secondary treatment of the man, his works and his times, I feel like the book is more a hit job, not that Ibn Khaldun did not deserve a bit of a hit, but the result is dissapointing in that I feel I've learned very little—the worst sin a book can commit.
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2 people found this helpful
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- David Watson
- 09-17-23
Disappointing
I was seriously misled by the publishers summary and the Audible sample. The narrator does a good job but the text itself is frustrating
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- Allan
- 02-13-21
Ibn Khaldun Summed Up Well
Ibn Khaldun's writings, thoughts, and his time are well summed up. Includes modern scholarship on the North African intellectual and his influences today.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Alpine Aesthete
- 02-29-24
Superb intellectual biography
The book was well researched and the author clearly lays out Ibn Khaldun’s life in the context of his time whilst also situating his oeuvre vis-a-vis later commentators, historians, and scholars.
The narration performance was also excellent. Always easy to follow and pleasant to listen to.
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- Azman Nor
- 02-27-24
Commentary to Muqaddimah by Irwin
The writer has practically wrote a negative message to Ibin Khaldun Muqaddimah’s great work. This is almost a book on character assassination and not a beautiful biography that one would expect out of this once great Islamic philosopher and social scientist. The author’s commentary was largely trying to discredit Ibin Khaldun’s great work in writing Muqaddimah. It’s appalling to me to continue listening. I have decided to stop mid way into Chapter 8 as I cannot listen to this twisted message anymore. Sorry to say this as this is only my personal view who has read the book Al Muqaddimah.
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- Moh 3aly
- 01-02-19
Issues with accuracy, pronounciation
This book would have received a higher rating if the author had spent more time learning Arabic, or perhaps reviewed translation before producing his own. In Chapter one he quotes the Qur'an 17:16 in an entirely lopsided manner, confusing what fafasaku means in the context. Not a single Qur'anic translation, Muslim or otherwise had confused it in the way he did, where as his version says that God has ordered the people to be bad, the actual verse says they did ill DESPITE receiving commandments from God. How could he has so thoroughly corrupted the verse is embarrassing and says a lot about the author.
Also, he criticizes some of Ibn Khaldun's theories without taking into context what was known at the time. Such as his idea heat is produced as a result of reflections of light, not of distance to the sun. A good idea why he might have thought that is how mountains are snow capped, same with alexander's submarine, he wouldve had no idea that a person could suffocate from being trapped in a room with no air from outside, his idea that heat would be the primary cause of mortality is a result of direct observation that the air you exhale is hotter than that which you inhale.
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24 people found this helpful
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- Felix El-Bezri
- 04-29-20
Awful audio of an otherwise decent work.
I am a fan of Irwin’s work, an orientalist of remarkable erudition, and I was truly looking forward to this new work. Two hours into the audio, and I’m sad to say it is way below sub-par and I must let it go. The narrator mangles simple common Arabic words beyond recognition; his pronunciation of commonplace Arabic surnames as if they were French (specifically using the French “r” for what reason I have no idea) is inexplicable and frankly jarring; sometimes his reading of foreign/Arabic or Persian terms is so annoyingly halting it sounds as if entire phrases and passages have been recorded over. I will try to give the print book a shot, but this audio is definitely not a good sign. Irwin is a thoughtful meticulous scholar; his writing is illuminating, compelling, witty; this audio is godawful and renders Ibn Khaldun unapproachable. I can’t believe Princeton would approve the production of such a shoddy rendition of an eminent scholar’s work. DO NOT BUY!
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- James R. Modrall
- 09-11-22
Big disappointment
I've been curious about Ibn Khaldun for years and expected this book to be more helpful in understanding his life and work than diving into the original texts (or more likely excerpts). I'm persuaded that Irwin know his stuff but it's not clear who he is writing for. For someone who already knows Ibn Khaldun's work and the history of his times, his comments could be interesting (but perhaps superficial). For a general reader like me, he offers a more or less random mix of comments on aspects of Ibn Khaldun's work and references to historical figures of the period mixed in with quotes from Gibbon, modern historians, Frank Herbert etc. I don't have any complaints about the reading but I'm not qualified to comment on the pronunciation.
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