Geography in Arabic - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Silverstein, Adam
Leiden
Brill
(7,806 words)
Geography , broadly understood, is a field to which Muslim scholars writing in Arabic have made important contributions. In some cases new geographical notions or data were discovered. In other cases existing materials that had been previously limited to particular civilisations-Ancient Near Eastern, Indo-Iranian, Semitic, Hellenistic, and others-were collected, analysed, and reworked within a single framework for the first time, often leading to significant improvements on the received materials. 1. The genre The situation of caliphal territory, covering an enormous landmass that stretched from modern Portugal in the