Science and Islam A History

by Masood, Ehsan

• ISBN13: 9781848310810
• ISBN10: 1848310811
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-05
• Publisher: Icon Books

Summary

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, Science and Islam tells the story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science: the extraordinary Islamic scientific revolution between 700 and 1400 CE. Book jacket.

Author Biography

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

A note on language	p. ix
Prologue	p. xiii
The Dark Age Myth	p. 1
The Islamic Quest	p. 15
The Coming of the Prophet	p. 17
Building Islam	p. 29
Baghdad's Splendour	p. 39
The Caliph of Science	p. 55
The Flowering of Andalusia	p. 65
Beyond the Abbasids	p. 81
Branches of Learning	p. 93
The Best Gift From God	p. 95
Astronomy: The Structured Heaven	p. 117
Number: The Living Universe of Islam	p. 139
At Home in the Elements	p. 153
Ingenious Devices	p. 161
Second Thoughts	p. 167
An Endless Frontier	p. 169
One Chapter Closes, Another Begins	p. 187
Science and Islam: Lessons from History	p. 207
Timeline	p. 217
Acknowledgements	p. 223
Sources	p. 227
Index	p. 233
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