Articles From Our Experts

For eight hundred years, the Arabic scientific tradition was superior to that found in western Eurasia. It gave birth to new theories and fields of scientific inquiry that laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution, and continued to flourish thereafter.

Kept alive until today by a very small number of chalgi Baghdad ensembles and through remaining shellac recordings, Iraqi maqam is a sophisticated musical genre from urban Iraq that developed in the 1920s‒1940s.

Around 150 AD Claudius Ptolemaeus wrote the great handbook of astronomy, later known as the Almagest, which became the prevalent handbook for the knowledge of the stars in Europe for about 1500 years. The text was handed on to the Europeans through Arabic translations in the ninth century AD, and translated into Latin in the twelfth century.

Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq: a Medieval Arab scholar who transformed his understanding of ancient Greek medical texts into manuals for the benefit of many successive generations of students.

An enormous effort was made to translate almost all known Greek literature into Arabic during the 8th to 10th centuries, and Baghdad was at the centre of this work. Why was it that so many of the translators were Christians?

How did an illustrated Arabic manuscript on the Art of War come into the possession of an illegitimate son of a King; his extraordinary and ultimately tragic life leading to its acquisition by the British Library?

In the pre-modern Arabic-speaking lands, as the world over, the lives of people and animals were intertwined in manifold ways. This resulted in the production of numerous Arabic scientific, veterinary, and related texts on the world of beasts.

Among pre-modern Arabic scholars, the Almagest was generally regarded as the most authoritative work on astronomy. This esteem for Ptolemy's text, however, contrasted with a common practice among Arabic readers not to consult the Almagest directly but to rely on later commentaries for studying Ptolemy's theories.

Wherever British merchants, sailors, or officials went, they left behind permanent markers of their presence in the form of cemeteries and other memorials. These cemeteries often caused political and religious issues for both their creators and the rulers of the countries in which they were located.

The removal of original backgrounds and inscriptions reveals a tension between the photographers ‘Abd al-Ghaffār and Snouck Hurgronje in terms of their process, approach to and outlook on photography.

During the first four centuries of Islam, almost all the Greek scientific literature available in manuscripts was translated into Arabic in an effort, centred on Baghdad, known as the ‘translation movement’.

How did a fourteenth century illustrated ‘Treatise on the Art of Riding and using the Instruments of War’ end up in the British Library’s Arabic manuscript collection? A ‘Nincumpoop’ of the Napoleonic era, who moonlighted as an antiquarian, holds the answer.

A 1787 letter requesting plants from the Persian Gulf for a newly established botanical garden in Kolkata illuminates the way in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge became part of the EIC’s global economic endeavour.

In AD 137, Ptolemy compiled a catalogue of forty-eight constellations containing 1022 stars. ʽAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī revised critically Ptolemy’s catalogue, added new stars and identified those appearing in the Arabic folk tradition.

In 1920, a gift from Ibn Saud in the form of a female oryx was the first ever to have survived the difficult journey from Arabia to London.

Ptolemaic astronomy became known in mediaeval Europe mainly through translations from Arabic. Latin translations of the Almagest reflect the complex tradition of Ptolemy in the Arab world and show the translators' individual approaches to a demanding and unfamiliar science.

During a period often characterised as one of decay and decline, the Andaluso-Tunisian astronomer Ibn al-Raqqām wrote his Risālah fī ‘ilm al-ẓilāl, the most important treatise on sundials of the Islamic West. The instruments he describes are much more elaborate and sophisticated than the surviving examples of Medieval sundials from al-Andalus and the Maghrib.

Kuwait has maintained a thriving traditional music culture; in particular bahri, or sea music, and ṣawt have remained at the heart of the music scene.

With the oil industry booming in Bahrain in the early 1930s, BAPCO oil workers, amongst others, lobbied for the first cinemas to be established.

A religious disagreement in 1930 between the Sultanate of Muscat and American missionaries in Muscat reveals more than just a battle for souls.

How geophysicists working in the Gulf were able to contribute in the 1930s to the scientific community’s understanding of the earth’s magnetic field.