Science and Islam (Icon Science): A History

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.

From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston.

Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.

Ehsan Masood is a senior editor with the science journal Nature, based in London. His other books include The Great Invention, on the story of how GDP became the world's dominant economic indicator. For a decade he taught science and innovation policy at Imperial College London and he is also a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also presented Islam and Science, a three-part series for BBC Radio on science in today's Islamic world.