These studies represent the major contributions to the history of Islamic technology during the second half of the 20th century beside Donald Hill’s separate publications on the mechanical devices of Pseudo-Apollonios, the Banu Musa and al-Jazari. A gifted linguist who was trained as a historian of Islamic civilisation, and also a professional engineer, Hill achieved his goal of setting his subject on a solid basis. The papers reprinted here include his early studies of the trebuchet and the camel and horse, several overviews of different aspects of Islamic technology, articles on specific topics such as the Cairo Nilometer and al-Biruni’s geared luni-solar device, and the first notice of an extremely important Andalusian treatise on mechanical devices discovered in 1975.

Recent historical research and new perspectives on the Islamic scientific tradition.

In Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam Tsugitaka Sato explores the actual day-to-day life in medieval Muslim societies through different aspects of sugar. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources - chronicles, geographies, travel accounts, biographies, medical and pharmacological texts, and more - he describes sugarcane cultivation, sugar production, the sugar trade, and sugar’s use as a sweetener, a medicine, and a symbol of power. He gives us a new perspective on the history of the Middle East, as well as the history of sugar across the world. This book is a posthumous work by a leading scholar of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in Japan who made many contributions to this field.

No detailed description available for "Islamic Science and Engineering".

A “well-organized and interesting” overview of science in the Muslim world in the seventh through seventeenth centuries, with over 100 illustrations (The Middle East Journal). During the Golden Age of Islam, in the seventh through seventeenth centuries A. D., Muslim philosophers and poets, artists and scientists, princes and laborers created a unique culture that has influenced societies on every continent. This book offers a fully illustrated, highly accessible introduction to an important aspect of that culture: the scientific achievements of medieval Islam. Howard Turner, who curated the subject for a major traveling exhibition, opens with a historical overview of the spread of Islamic civilization from the Arabian peninsula eastward to India and westward across northern Africa into Spain. He describes how a passion for knowledge led the Muslims during their centuries of empire-building to assimilate and expand the scientific knowledge of older cultures, including those of Greece, India, and China. He explores medieval Islamic accomplishments in cosmology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, medicine, natural sciences, alchemy, and optics. He also indicates the ways in which Muslim scientific achievement influenced the advance of science in the Western world from the Renaissance to the modern era. This survey of historic Muslim scientific achievements offers students and other readers a window into one of the world’s great cultures, one which is experiencing a remarkable resurgence as a religious, political, and social force in our own time.

In rich detail Jonathan Berkey interprets the social and cultural consequences of Islam's regard for knowledge, showing how education in the Middle Ages played a central part in the religious experience of nearly all Muslims. Focusing on Cairo, which under Mamluk rule (1250-1517) was a vital intellectual center with a complex social system, the author describes the transmission of religious knowledge there as a highly personal process, one dependent on the relationships between individual scholars and students. The great variety of institutional structures, he argues, supported educational efforts without ever becoming essential to them. By not being locked into formal channels, religious education was never exclusively for the elite but was open to all. Berkey explores the varying educational opportunities offered to the full run of the Muslim population--including Mamluks, women, and the "common people." Drawing on medieval chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and treatises on education, as well as the deeds of endowment that established many of Cairo's schools, he explains how education drew groups of outsiders into the cultural center and forged a common Muslim cultural identity. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights', as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.