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, …

Abu Zayd Hunayn bin Ishaq al Ibadi ranks as the finest medical and scientific mind of the early Abassid era. Born in 809 to an apothecary in Al Hirah, Hunayn went to Baghdad to study medicine as a young man. There he enrolled in the earliest known private medical school in Islam under the direction …

The 10th century saw the zenith of the Umayyad golden age in Andalusia. Under the leadership of ‘Abd ar-Rahman An-Nasir (r. 912-961) and his son Al-Hakam II, this dynasty established sovereignty over the majority of the Iberian Peninsula. The capital Cordoba developed into Europe’s greatest metropolis, a thriving city of half a million, where educational and …

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 …

Although astronomers through their study of the universe were able to theorize about such general geographical concepts like the shape of the earth, early geography was for the most part a product of the imagination: a collection of wondrous fables and marvelous tales of faraway places.