The Umayyads, the first dynasty of Islam, ruled over a vast empire from their central province of Syria, providing a line of caliphs from 661 to 750. Another branch later ruled in al-Andalus - Islamic Spain - from 756 to 1031, ruling first as emirs and then as caliphs themselves. This book is the first to bring together studies of this far-flung family and treat it not as two unrelated caliphat…
The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and in general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations - the Greeks in particular. In this thought-provoking and original book, George Saliba argues that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the foundations …