Science and Islam (Icon Science): A History

by Ehsan Masood

Overview

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.

From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston.

Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785782022
Publisher:	Amberley Publishing
Publication date:	04/06/2017
Series:	Icon Science
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ehsan Masood is a senior editor with the science journal Nature, based in London. His other books include The Great Invention, on the story of how GDP became the world's dominant economic indicator. For a decade he taught science and innovation policy at Imperial College London and he is also a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also presented Islam and Science, a three-part series for BBC Radio on science in today's Islamic world.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the second edition ix

A note on language xix

Prologue xxiii

1 The Dark Age Myth 1

Part I The Islamic Quest 15

2 The Coming of the Prophet 17

3 Building Islam 29

4 Baghdad's Splendour 39

5 The Caliph of Science 55

6 The Flowering of Andalusia 65

7 Beyond the Abbasids 81

Part II Branches of Learning 93

8 The Best Gift From God 95

9 Astronomy: The Structured Heaven 117

10 Number: The Living Universe of Islam 139

11 At Home in the Elements 153

12 Ingenious Devices 161

Part III Second Thoughts 167

13 An Endless Frontier 169

14 One Chapter Closes, Another Begins 187

15 Science and Islam: Lessons From History 207

Timeline 217

Acknowledgements 223

Sources 227

Index 233