Robert Irwin's Top Book Recommendations

Robert Irwin

He spends about two and a half years writing the first draught of the Muqaddimah, which he will work on for the rest of his life. It’s one hell of a great work. It’s intended as a prolegomenon – an introduction to what he is going to write – and the complexity starts there, really, because he started out with one idea of what he was going to write about…. And then he broadens and broadens [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

It's a history of the world written by an intellectual who lived in the 1300s. It focuses on how society and culture flow, including the creation of cities, politics, commerce and science. While much of what was believed then is now disproven after 700 more years of progress, it's still very interesting to see what was understood at this time and the overall worldview when it's all considered together. [source]

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The reason I chose this book is that it’s the first work of global history that has what we might now qualify as a social scientific theory, instead of just representing history as providential—although Ibn Khaldun is a fatalist: he does believe that everything is in the hands of God. But he sees God as working in history through what we might call social mechanisms, in particular through the antipathy, the struggle, the dialectic, if you like, between settled and pastoral peoples. [source]

Robert Irwin

It’s a novel about the clash of cultures, the intermixture of cultures. It’s a novel about what happens to a man, or two men, when they leave their village and go north, to England, the land where the fish die of cold, and get a western education, and some of the dangers of that. It’s a very strange and very complex novel [source]

Ellah Allfrey

I love the title. It’s about a Sudanese man who has lived in England and been educated at Oxford and he goes back to his village and meets a stranger there, Mustafa, who has also been to England. The narrator is not named. It’s about return and what happens when you make that journey. Really, once you’ve left you can never come back, even if you do go back. [source]

Mathias Enard

It’s a masterpiece. Probably the best Arabic novel of the 20th century. Subtle, dark and deeply ironic. [source]

Robert Irwin

What’s wonderful about the Arabian Nights is that the tales are really rather stripped down and there’s not a lot of deep psychology. You’re not reading Middlemarch. There’s not all that much in the way of description. The palaces would be conventionally described, the beautiful woman would have eyebrows like this and lips like that, all conventional similes – they rush through it. What you’re getting is a pure story; the Nights is kind of like an engine of stories. It’s wonderful to see how stories work in a very nuts-and-bolts way as you work through them: how tension is managed and how characters are introduced and so on [source]

Andrei Codrescu

Burton’s extraordinary footnotes are a book on their own, and his translation, hard-going at first, takes English to amazing heights. [source]

Issandr El Amrani

This translation is really significant. It is a beautiful edition of one of my favourite books. [source]

Robert Irwin

He is a serious writer, but all the time he breaks it up with jokes and digressions – brilliant digressions that remain in fashion until well into the 10th century, maybe later. It’s called al-jidd wa al-hazl, ‘seriousness and joking’, the good discourse of a cultured man. The writing of a cultured man should alternate, you see, it shouldn’t just be boringly serious all the time, and Jahiz was brilliant at that [source]

Robert Irwin

He is a serious writer, but all the time he breaks it up with jokes and digressions – brilliant digressions that remain in fashion until well into the 10th century, maybe later. It’s called al-jidd wa al-hazl, ‘seriousness and joking’, the good discourse of a cultured man. The writing of a cultured man should alternate, you see, it shouldn’t just be boringly serious all the time, and Jahiz was brilliant at that [source]

Robert Irwin

Masudi doesn’t – unlike most of the historians who follow him, who write strictly Islamic history that perhaps give some nod to pre Islamic Arabia, but for whom history really only gets exciting at the coming of the prophet – provide a history of the Islamic world and think ‘job done’, perhaps finishing off with what’s known about how the world’s going to end. On the contrary, Masudi travelled widely, well beyond the frontiers of Islam, and was particularly interested in all the non-Islamic cultures he visited [source]

Robert Irwin

Masudi doesn’t – unlike most of the historians who follow him, who write strictly Islamic history that perhaps give some nod to pre Islamic Arabia, but for whom history really only gets exciting at the coming of the prophet – provide a history of the Islamic world and think ‘job done’, perhaps finishing off with what’s known about how the world’s going to end. On the contrary, Masudi travelled widely, well beyond the frontiers of Islam, and was particularly interested in all the non-Islamic cultures he visited [source]