The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Ibn Khaldun's fourteenth century work in Franz Rosenthal's standard English translation from Princeton University Press, 1958, contains a systematic review of the hadith reports concerning the Mahdi and their chains of transmission, in which Ibn Khaldun concludes most are weak, addressed within a chapter on Mahdist claimants of his own fourteenth century. Its strength is that it is a primary medieval Islamic historiographical text in a vetted scholarly translation, engaging its own subject with the critical historical method Ibn Khaldun himself pioneered. Its limit is that Rosenthal's translation, though standard, reflects one translator's choices; a reader needing the precise Arabic wording of a specific hadith chain should consult the original alongside it.