The Islamic world has a rich artistic tradition of creating highly geometric and symmetric ornamentation. Over the centuries, the process of creating Islamic tilings was refined from the 15th Century ornamentation in the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain to the exquisite tilings, which are seen in mosques, mausoleums and minarets throughout the world today. The contemporary mathematics of group...

A hinterland in the old world of Islam, the early history of diffusion of Islamic civilization in Bengal is shrouded with mystery. Though the maritime and trade contacts between Arab world and Bengal can be traced during the early period of Islam, the religious and cultural interaction between these two far-fetched lands started growing only after the Muslim conquest of the region in the early ...

Islamic medicine, Arabic medicine, Arab-Islamic medicine, or Greco-Arab and Islamic medicine refers to medicine developed in the Golden Age of the Arab-Islamic civilization, which extended from Spain in the west to Central Asia and India in the east. In temporal terms it covered a period of roughly nine centuries, from the middle of the seventh to the end of the fifteenth century. Medicine was ...

This article examines the unique risks associated with Islamic financial institutions and the secular state’s reticence to directly regulate their religious dimension. It argues that the state’s method of regulating the Islamic financial industry ignores special reputational risks associated with the religious and cultural distinctiveness of Islamic banks. The Financial Services Authority (FSA)...

In 1962, the historian A. B. L. Awasthi wrote, “the Turkish conquest of India began with the Arab conquest of Sind.” The sentiment expresses a common teleology according to which Muslims, irregardless of their ethnicity, linguistic identities, or specific sectarian affiliations, acted in concert across more than five centuries to affect a “slow progress of Islamic power” in South Asia as D. R. ...

since the evidence for direct maritime trade between the sassanid empire and china is exiguous, it has often been asserted that there was no direct sea commerce between these two countries. scholars claim that there is nothing to prove direct chinese sailings to iran before islam and say that direct sea commerce between them was occurred during early islamic period. based on the historical, arc...

the ancient iranian prophet, manese, rose in the early days of the establishment of the sassanid empire. by mixing the customs and rituals of various religions such as christianity, judaism, buddhism and hinduism, it easily managed to approach the different nations in every region around iran and gather a large number of following. through intense opposition by the zoroastrian magi, however, ma...

6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, wa...

the oldest works of muslim scholars in the fields of kalām , ḥadīth and tafsīr during the 2nd and 3rd centuries ah rarely offer an explicit basis for regarding the qur’ān as an inimitable miracle of the prophet. however, the issue appears fully fledged in the works of scholars such as al-bāqillānī, qāḍī ‘abd al-jabbār and al-sharīf al- murtaḍā. this silence in the early islamic centuries, when ...