A recent recommendation from another thread has seen me reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (2002) of late, and Ibn Khaldun's historiographical ideas -- especially about the purported cycle of dynasties and the limits of civilizations -- play an important role in this often fanciful but still amazingly moving alt-history novel. I am probably going to have much more to ask about things related to this book (Robinson's, that is) in the days to come, as it has thoroughly unsettled my otherwise serenely modern, Western mind, but the matter of Ibn Khaldun seems the most pressing.
Where does he stand in modern historiography -- especially where the East is concerned? How were his ideas received during his own life and that of his works? Is there a widely-accepted translation of the Muqaddimah that you'd recommend? I've been working off the Princeton one so far, and it's been absolutely spellbinding (if very obviously -- and occasionally satisfyingly -- medieval).
Ibn Khaldun's theories were greatly influential in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, and contributed to Ottoman intellectuals conceiving of the imperial experience in terms of bodily metaphors. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's ideas about the various stages which a dynastic state experienced, Ottoman historians such as Kâtib Çelebi and Mustafa Naima argued that the Ottoman Empire's history could also be divided into stages which corresponded to the stages of a human life. Likewise, dynastic states had organs - the military, bureaucracy, peasantry, artisans, etc. all corresponding to various parts of the body. They could be beset by ailments and would require specific cures in order to prolong their lifespans, while the wrong cure could prove fatal. These bodily metaphors eventually found their way into Western thinking as well (though not in such stark terms), and were used to explain Ottoman history - the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century was the "Sick Man of Europe", and its history was likewise divided into stages of rise and decline. Nowadays, of course, this is all quite frowned upon. But it ultimately goes back to the ideas of Ibn Khaldun, who indirectly influenced the way in which twentieth-century historians would look upon Ottoman history.
Assuming this is the Princeton edition your using is this one then it's the Franz Rosenthal translation from 1958. This translation is the "standard" one insofar as, as far as I'm aware, it's the only one. So although I've read criticism of the translation there aren't exactly other options unless you want to learn to read arabic.
/u/Chamboz gives a better description than I could about the intellectual adoption of the Muqaddimah in the Ottoman empire.
Historiographically, I mean, historians have moved on a bit in the past 650 years but concepts like asabiya are still widely used and referred to in reference to the steppe empires of the Middle Ages and his account of the rise and fall of these dynasties remains highly plausible. As a result he is still almost inevitably referenced and discussed in histories of this period.
Of course, his reputation goes a bit beyond that. As I'm sure you've gleaned from reading it this is a profoundly deep thinker who was astoundingly innovative a huge number of what we would today describe as separate fields of the humanities, and in a way that it is now increasingly recognized preceded a number of European thinkers we normally attribute some of these ideas to like Weber or Marx.
There's a great In Our Time episode on the subject if you're interested: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qckbw