Muslims are enjoined to face Mecca during their five daily prayers, just as all mosques are supposed to be oriented toward the Ka‘ba in Mecca, in what is known as the direction of theqibla.¹ Before mathematical methods became available, Muslims determined the direction of the qibla based on the practices of the early Companions of the Prophet Muḥammad and their successors. They also made use of traditions of folk astronomy and of the astronomical alignment of the Ka‘ba itself. These methods provided reasonable approximations in locations close to Mecca but were quite inaccurate in faraway places like North Africa...

The relationship between science and philosophy in Islamic intellectual history is often described in one of two contradictory ways. Earlier historians of Islam and Islamic science repeatedly underscored the practical orientation of Islamic science and the lack of theoretical and philosophical rigor. Muslims, according to this thesis, viewed the sciences as crafts, not systems of knowledge, stripping them of their philosophical underpinnings and undermining their systematic and truly scientific nature. According to this view, the philosophical and scientific package that was imported and did not emerge from within Arabic society did not have a serious impact on Islamic culture; as...

Some important debates that pertained to the nature of scientific knowledge, the intellectual authority of science, and the social and institutional authority of scientists were primarily religious, not merely joined by religious scholars or driven by a sense of religious unease about the sciences. It is of course a truism to say that the relationship between science and religion in Muslim societies is multifaceted. Nothing else could have been the case, given the temporal and geographical spans of the scientific enterprise in these societies and the diversity of the intellectual traditions that informed views about the science-religion relationship. Although a...

The title of this book isIslam, Science, and the Challenge of History. My initial challenge was to write a justifiable and nuanced history of Islamic science. Here the questions were how to understand the sciences in classical Muslim societies in their historical contexts; how to avoid the temptation of writing the history of Islamic science as a history of scientific precursors and forerunners; how to provide a reasonably accurate account of the continuously changing social contexts of scientific production; how to achieve a deep, multilayered understanding of the conditions of production and reproduction of a scientific culture; how to...