Rosenthal demonstrates the significance of the Classical heritage by drawing together the great range of literary renderings, paraphrases, commentaries and imitations, as well as independent Islamic elaborations.

The concluding pages of al-Tabari’s History cover the caliphates of al-Mu'tadid and al-Muktafi and the beginning of the reign of al-Muqtadir–altogether a period of 23 turbulent years in world history…

The Muqaddimah (

), often translated as Introduction or Prolegomenon, is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (d…