A survey of an entire tradition of historical thought and writing across a span of eight hundred years.

Thinking and writing about the past has always been of critical importance to the way that any culture or civilization views itself and its role in the world. In a work which surveys an entire tradition of historical thought and writing across a span of eight hundred years, Tarif Khalidi examines how Arabic-Islamic culture of the pre-modern period viewed the past, how it recorded it, and how it sought to answer the many complex questions associated with the discipline of history. The author combines a chronological with a topical approach to place the tradition within its wider intellectual context and socio-political environment, while quotations from historians across the period introduce the English-speaking reader to some of the principal intellectual texts of Arabic Islamic culture.