Did Copernicus borrow his cosmological theory from an earlier Muslim scientist? New research reveals that the cosmological model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus, the renowned European Renaissance polymath, closely resembles one designed by an Arab astronomer…
This chapter is organised in the following manner. Section one gives a brief overview about important periods in the history of Islamic Astronomy. This is done in order to highlight the significance of choosing to…
15-16th Century Italian-Islamic Exchanges of the Astrolabe and Effects on Visual Culture
Some people, unaware of what was accomplished during Muslim civilisation, believe that astronomy died with the Greeks, and was brought to life again by Nicolas Copernicus, the 15th-century Polish astronomer who is famous for introducing…
Syria in the 14th century was the scene of the most sophisticated developments in astronomy anywhere in the world. Shams al-Din al-Khalili was a muwaqqit, or mosque astronomer, in Damascus in the middle of that…
The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations—the Greeks…
In this era of intolerance and cultural tension, Professor Al-Khalili launched a hearty plea in The Guardian in January 2008 to appreciate the fertile scholarship that flowered with Islam. The tradition of Islamic science contributed…
This article by Professor Sevim Tekeli, a leading historian of science in the Ottoman period, deals with an aspect of the work of Taqi al-Din Ibn Ma'ruf in trigonometry, a mathematical discipline which studies the…
Al-Zarqali is an eminent Andalusian astronomer of the 11th century who was the foremost astronomer of his time. He excelled in different domains of theoretical and practical astronomy and left works that influenced greatly his…
Some 800 years in the past, in 1206, a brilliant Muslim scholar died : Badi' al-Zaman Abu al-‘Izz ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari. He was one of the most important inventors and mechanical engineers in…
This article reviews the new book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance by George Saliba. The book describes the rise and fall of the Islamic scientific tradition, and the relationship of Islamic…
Khwarizm is the city of the birth of algebra, where Al-Biruni corrected and refined the sciences of the past and thought of the earth spinning on its axis many centuries before Copernicus.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Islamic science as well as current issues and future trends in the discipline. Significant references to modern scholarship on Islamic science and medicine, including the…