muhammad ibn hamed isfahani more popularly known as imad ad-din al-isfahani was a persian historian, scholar, and rhetorician. he left a valuable anthology of arabic poetry to accompany his many historical works. and worked as a man of letters during the zengid and ayyubid period. he was born in isfahan in the year 1125, and studied at the nizamiyya school in baghdad. he graduated into the bure...

During the 1020s Ibn Sı̄nā wrote a commentary in Arabic on the logical works of Aristotle, as part of his encyclopedia Al-Šifā’ (The Cure). The commentary runs to some 2180 pages in the recent Cairo edition; this figure includes his commentary Madk ̄ al on Porphyry’s Eisagōgē, which he counted as an introduction to Aristotle’s work. Apart from the Madk ̄ al which was translated into Latin in the 1...

BACKGROUND Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī, known as Rhazes in the Western world (854-925 CE), was an Iranian polymath, physician and one of the most prominent sages in the medieval period. He wrote several medical books and treaties such as "Continents", a comprehensive medical encyclopedia, treaties in smallpox and measles, "Al-Mansuri" and many other important manuscripts in the medi...

the phenomenon of doubt (hesitation) in pre-islamic (jaheli) poetry is usually accompanied with plagiarism (entehal). plagiary is not limited to any special nation; rather, it is widespread. in literary works of many nations. mohammad ibn-e-sallam aljomahi and abdolmalik ibn-e- hesham are among the most prominent critics of plagiary. also , morgolious, one of the greatest orientalists, has crit...

prominent topic, with further contributions in physics, astronomy, mechanics, cosmology, and psychology. The questions addressed largely consist of the puzzles of the curious layman (e.g. why is the sky sometimes red, how do flies stick to walls, etc.), presented in the style of the Greek problemata literature. The arguments offered in response are, as one would expect, essentially Aristotelian...

Even for the knowledgeable, the tasks get vitiated by the blemishes of fate or the gods, or the human nature. It is not impossible to divine what is meant here, but how much more idiomatically it could have been done: Things go wrong, even for the wise, because of the iniquities of fate and of men. The bibliographical control of source works is almost non-existent, although this is not always a...

After the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, scientific progress in Europe had come to a standstill. This era between fall of Rome and the Renaissance is commonly known as the dark ages. However, from the 8th till 13th century, scientific and cultural knowledge had flourished in the Islamic world. This period, which began soon after the establishment of the Abbasid Khalifate in Baghdad in the ...

After years of painstaking research Dr. Giuseppe Scattolin has at last published his critical edition of Ibn al-Fa≠rid ̋'s D|wa≠n. While Ibn al-Fa≠rid ̋ lived during the Ayyubid period, his verse was a dominant influence on later Arabic poetry composed under the Mamluks. Moreover, his verse and mystical ideas were, at times, sources of contention among factions of ulama during Mamluk rule, while ...

one of the fundamental problems of theoretical mysticism is how to explain the difference between god and the world on the basis of the idea of wahdat al-wujud (the unity of existence). following the explanation of certain necessary premises, this paper presents the theory of divine manifestation as one that can explain and analyze multiplicity. in this article we especially seek to solidify th...