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.