A 2,500-year old Cyrenian coin bears a puzzling image. A regal woman sits on a chair, touching a plant with one hand.

Edited by Karima Burns The hot and dusty plains of the Middle East have always created an environment in which endemic diseases of the eye such as trachoma and ophthalmia are unusually prevalent. During the Middle Ages, blindness was the leading cause of disability throughout the Islamic world, and an extensive specialist literature developed in …

One of the brightest names in Islamic medieval sciences is that of mathematician and scholar Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan bin al-Hasan bin al-Haytham, known as “Alhazen” to the Western world. Born in Basra, Iraq in 965, he won repute there as a mathematician and engineer. He was invited to move to Cairo, Egypt by the Fatimid …

Ibn Zuhr, known in the West as Avenzoar, was one of the greatest physicians, clinicians and parasitologists of the Middle Ages.

Algebra. Even the word is enough to strike terror into the hearts of junior high and high school students the world over – not to mention send shivers of apprehension down the backs of their parents as they start the process of solving for “x” or “y”, and sometimes both.

Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Jabir Ibn Sinan Al-Battani Al-Harrani, known in the West as Albategnius, is considered the greatest astronomer of his time and one of the greatest during the Middle Ages. Al-Battani was born around 858 C.E. in Battan, a state of Harran, and was first educated by his father Jabir Ibn San’an Al-Battani, …