Knowledge and Beauty in Classical Islam: An Aesthetic Reading of the Muqaddima by Ibn Khaldun

This volume offers an aesthetic reading of the Muqaddima by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), a text that has been studied up to the present as a work on historiography. It argues that the Muqaddima is also a comprehensive treatise on classical Arab-Islamic culture and provides a picture of classical Arab-Islamic aesthetics in its totality.

The theme of the book is the intrinsic connection between beauty and knowledge in the Muqaddima. Whenever Ibn Khaldūn deals with the problem of knowledge and scien...