Synopsis
Despite being one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the Abbasid caliphate, Alhasan Ibn al-Haytham makes a quiet living in Basra as a scholar and copyist. He's preparing to write a new treatise on vision and light when a strange man wearing unusual clothes kidnaps him and takes him to Cairo, for a meeting with the caliph, Al-Hakim. The “mad king” of the Fatimid caliphate wants Alhasan to utilize his brilliance to dam the mighty Nile River.
What follows is the kind of adventure that the quiet, reserved Alhasan could never have imagined. Alhasan's incredible journey will lead him to the brink of ruin – and perhaps to his most monumental discovery. A novel about one of history's most overlooked scholars, The Prisoner of Al-Hakim is filled with vivid characters, thrilling scenes, and rich philosophical debates. It's a story about how love, faith, and knowledge are ultimately intertwined, and tells us as much about our contemporary times as about bygone eras.
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About the Author
Bradley Steffens is a novelist, poet, and award-winning author of more than seventy nonfiction books for children and young adults. Kirkus Reviews named his The Dark Side of Social Media one of the Ten Best YA Nonfiction Books of 2021. He is a two-time winner of the San Diego Book Award for Best Children's and Young Adult Nonfiction: His Giants won the 2005 award, and his J.K. Rowling received the 2007 prize. He also received the 2007 Theodor S. Geisel Award for best book by a San Diego County author that year. This is his first novel.
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The Prisoner of Al Hakim (Paperback)
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. It was the Islamic Golden Age. Across the Middle East and North Africa, mosques and libraries hummed with scholarly activity. But in a small house near the center of Basra, one man, Alhasan Ibn al-Haytham, was troubled by what he read. The ancient Greeks were brilliant abstract thinkers, but their theories remained disconnected from the natural world. Just as Alhasan was setting out on his quest to unite theoretical models with physical reality, he was summoned to Egypt by Caliph Al-Hakim Bi-amr Allah, the sixth ruler of the Fatimid dynasty, to survey the Nile and devise a plan for taming it. He resisted going, but discovered at the end of a dagger he had no choice. Along the way, he was attacked by bandits, laid low by illness, accused of heresy, stripped of his books and papers, and imprisoned. Would he ever find a way to resume his studies? The only person who visited him was Sadeem bint Mourad, the young woman who delivered his meals. Could she help? Would she? He had to take a chance and ask. Little did he know her answer would change his life -- and science -- forever. Bradley Steffens's novel is a moving depiction of the life of Ibn Haytham, a great scholar who lived in the Islamic Golden Age, around the tenth century. Taking the reader across the Middle East and North Africa from mosques to libraries to the prisons, the book tells the story of an extraordinary individual whose scientific discoveries laid the foundation of optics in modern physics. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781682060162
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