Reddit reviews The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History - Abridged Edition (Princeton Classics (111))

Most things from the past will be unknown to most people - usually people know of the major stuff - not the minor details.

You might consider reading original material from scholar/travelers from China to India (the advantage of reading original material - esp. for a writer - is that you get loads of detailed material which is relevant for you and you may notice it - although it may not be relevant for the wider picture a historian maybe painting - so there will be details which will be valuable to get a sense of the environment).

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxian

and his accounts of visit to Taxila (Greco-Buddhist university - in present day Pakistan - which was part of the greater India in pre-1947 era):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxila

Or this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang

another link for him:

http://www.chinabuddhismencyclopedia.com/en/index.php/Xuanzang_or_Hsüan-tsang

There are many other original travelogues you can read to get an idea of that period and region.

You can read Al Biruni's India - which chronicles India as he experienced it in 1000 AD - the variations in Hinduism as were apparent to him. He bitterly criticizes one of his contemporary Muslim conquerors for being brutal (Mahmud Ghaznavi who is remembered by both Muslims and Hindus for his aggressive actions against hindus and their temples).

And these are all modern looking books - i.e. since the people/scholars who wrote these were perceptive etc. So Al Biruni's India includes some details about variations and the types of people.

https://www.amazon.com/Alberunis-Abridged-Library-Al-Biruni-1993-05-01/dp/B017POL2C8/

As aid to Al Biruni's critical recounting of the state of India around 1000 AD (much of the book is very technical examination of things) - you may consider reading some of the British journals of the people of India - where they documented for each region the tribes and their oral history (as an effort to understand them so they could rule them).


There are many books about history - Ibn Khaldun's Preface to his history of the world is one of the most famous books of science/observation (The Muqaddimah) - but you could peruse his voluminous history of the world - which would be somewhat fanciful - and this again would be around 1000 AD.

https://www.amazon.com/Muqaddimah-Introduction-History-Princeton-Classics/dp/0691166285

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Biruni

If you have interest in the European region from 900AD - there are some travelogues by Muslim scholars/travelers who went north into european lands (the inspiration for the movie starring "The 13th Warrior" starring Antonio Banderas):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/

The 13th Warrior

https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-Travellers/dp/0140455078/

Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North

Again these books come across as very contemporary - as their writers analyze each group of different (to their eyes) people they meet. It also gives secondary insight into the details of those periods.



Although slightly later than your time period - from the 1300s - you can read Ibn Battuta and his travels all over - and his fanciful descriptions of the people he meets:

https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Ibn-Battutah/dp/0330418793/

> Was he really that influential?

Proving influence is notoriously difficult. Unless we have explicit citations in a written work or evidence that an individual actually owned and read a book, it's almost to prove the provenance of an idea.

To take one example of the fields mentioned in your question, the most commonly cited "fathers of sociology" are the 19th century thinkers Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. As far as I'm aware, there is no evidence that any of them read ibn Khaldun.

Rather, what is remarkable about ibn Khaldun is the way in which readers since the 19th century have seen that his writings in the 14th century seemed to presage the thinking of much later writers.

> Do his theories and ideas still hold up?

I'm not entirely sure that's exactly the right question. Very few people I think would make the case, per se, that Marx's ideas "hold up", certainly not in toto. But that doesn't mean that he's not very much worth reading and understanding.

To give perhaps the best known example of ibn Khaldun's thinking, his concept of "asabiyyah," or tribal solidarity, remains extremely influential in how historians of Islamic society approach the subject because it's a very useful and succinct observation about how and why tribal military dominance seems to have a pattern of rise and fall across Islamic history.

Outside of historians of Islam, recognition of his genius and of his usefulness has been slower coming, but there have been efforts to place his thinking alongside Western thinkers on these topics regardless of whether or not those other 19th and 20th century thinkers had actually read his work.

The wikipedia article on his best-known work, the Muqadimmah (literally The Introduction, which is to say that it was actually merely his introduction to his much, much longer general history, but is today treated as a separate work because it's the most interesting) covers a lot of the specific ideas that he seems to have presaged in these fields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah

There is also an In Our Time episode discussing his works and influence: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qckbw

Unfortunately I have to confess that I haven't read it cover to cover, but the Muqadimmah itself is available in English is the most relevant work of Ibn Khaldun's to read: https://www.amazon.com/Muqaddimah-Introduction-History-Princeton-Classics/dp/0691166285

Hi bro. What the other guy said tbh. Here are 3 books I'd advise looking at. Also read quran and see if you can understand how people were inspired to advance the world after reading it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Islamic-Theory-Evolution-Missing-Between/dp/0982586701

https://www.amazon.co.uk/1001-Inventions-Enduring-Legacy-Civilization/dp/1426209347

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0691166285/