Introduction to Universal History, also known in the West as the Prolegomena and in Arabic as Al-Muqaddima, was written in 1377 as a prologue to the first book on world history by Ibn Khaldun. However, already during the author's lifetime it was considered an independent work, of an encyclopedic nature, which encompasses all the knowledge of the 14th century that we easily relate today to philosophy, history, economics, sociology, politics, urbanism, medicine, magic, religion, philology or ecology. Ibn Khaldun made use of all the written sources of the time: Greco-Latin, Byzantine and Muslim. Many modern thinkers see it as one of the original sources from which the social sciences draw.

What we now call al-Muqaddima, literally The Introduction, which is generally published separately from the rest of the work, is made up of the Introduction and the First Book and which, as can be seen, contains the considerations that must be taken into account to understand the historical events, which are reported in the other two Books. Although we can consider it independent of the Kitāb al-Icbar, to which it serves as a prologue and explanatory key, it must be seen as the creation of a medieval sage, as such obliged to know and capable of dealing with omni rescibile (“of everything susceptible to to be known"), as the great defining authors of humanism claimed in the century following that of our author.

The extraordinary relevance of the socio-political and socio-cultural ideas expounded in al-Muqaddima have led to less attention being paid to other aspects of the work that, in other circumstances, would have aroused greater interest. Ibn Khaldun's attitude towards religion –we believe that it is not always well understood–, magic, mathematics, astrology, philology deserve more attention than has been paid up to now and also offer the true dimension and intellectual stature of an integral sage.