FROM THE TRANSLATORS This publication includes translations of two works by the greatest English Arabist H. Gibb: “Arabic literature. An introduction” and “Muslim historiography” (Ta'rikh). In Russian, in addition to useful in their time, but already outdated works by I. Kholmogorov 1[1] and V. Girgas[2], there are reviews of Arabic literature by A. Krymsky and I. Krachkovsky that still serve as textbooks for students. The first of them has long become a bibliographic rarity; in addition, it is written unevenly, is equipped with cumbersome scientific apparatus and is outdated in some parts, and the second is too short. At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. the famous “History of Arabic Literature” by the German orientalist K. Brockelmann[3] appeared - a biobibliographical collection in which a huge factual material accumulated by that time by science, and a brief overview of the “external” history of Arabic literature is given. Based on this work, scientists from a number of countries - K. Brockelman himself in Germany, I. Pizzi in Italy, Kl. Huard in France, R. Nicholson and H. Gibb in England, M. de Gouet in Holland, A. Krymsky in Russia, I. Goldzier in Hungary - made an attempt to compile a general outline of the development of literature in Arabic from its origins to modern times. Differing in volume {5} and manner of presentation, they aimed to trace the main stages in the development of medieval Arabic literature, to characterize the main genres and types of this literature, as well as its outstanding representatives. Among the most successful in structure and form of presentation is the essay offered to the reader by X. Gibb “Arab literature". Chronologically, it covers the entire history of Arabic literature, from ancient times to the emergence of modern modern Arabic literature, which the author touches upon only in the conclusion. He subsequently dedicated a separate essay to her[4]. In his essay, X. Gibb pays the main attention to the history of poetry and prose, touching on other departments and types of Arabic literature only to the extent necessary to reconstruct a more or less complete picture of the development of literature in Arabic. With the richest historical literature in Arabic The language is introduced by the translation proposed in this edition of the work of H. Gibb “Muslim Historiography”, written in 1938 for the additional volume of the “Encyclopedia of Islam”[5]. With a certain schematism and some abstractness of construction, this essay X. Gibba remains to this day the most successful attempt to present a general picture of the development of Muslim historiography in Arabic and Persian over more than nine centuries of its history. During the translation, we checked all the dates and clarified some of them; quotations from Arabic works were verified with the originals, poetic English translations from Arabic poets were replaced by our prosaic Russian translations. The selected bibliography compiled by H. Gibb is here preserved and slightly expanded. In addition, we have compiled, in relation to this book, a selected bibliography of manuals in Russian and translations from Arabic into Russian. {6}