Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study

This is the first illustrated study of the whole of Islamic science ever undertaken. Basing himself on the traditional Islamic concept of science and its transmission and classification, the author discusses various branches of the Islamic sciences from cosmology, geography, and other qualitative and descriptive sciences to the mathematical sciences which include arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, astronomy, and music as well as certain branches of physics. The author then turns to the application of the Islamic sciences to such domains as medicine, pharmacology, alchemy, agriculture, and various forms of technology connected with irrigation as well as the making of automata. In the final section of the work, the author discusses the role of the human being in the universe, the equilibrium between the human being and nature and the integration of the sciences of the cosmos into the total scheme of knowledge drawn from the Quranic revelation. The book combines an account of the morphology and brief history of the various sciences with illustrations drawn from sources spread throughout the Islamic world. Contains over 160 color photographs.