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NOTE TO READERS
    D EFINITIONS OF TERMS and concepts are rarely associated with works for the general reader, no matter how serious or weighty the subject, and I have deliberately kept these to a minimum. Nonetheless, a few words are in order at the outset about my choice of “Arab science”—or words to that effect—to convey the complex cultural milieu of the medieval Islamic world, rather than “Islamic science.” As many readers will already be aware, much of the cultural flowering in this time and place was not exclusively the work of ethnic Arabs. Nor was it strictly the work of Muslims. Persians—including Zoroastrians and Christians—Jews, Greeks, Syriac Christians, Turks, Kurds, and others played crucial roles in all aspects of science, theology, and philosophy.
    However, this work was almost always conducted in Arabic and frequently under the aegis of Arab rulers, most notably the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, first in Damascus and then in Baghdad. In one notable case, as we shall see, an ethnic Persian scholar produced a major work in his native language but then rewrote it in Arabic, which he found far more precise and more effective for his purposes. Throughout much of the period in question, Arabic served as the global language of scholarship, and learned men of all stripes could travel widely and hold serious and nuanced discussions in this lingua franca. Medieval Western scholars who wanted access to the latest findings also needed to master the Arabic tongue, or work from translations by those who had done so. It is also worth noting that such labels, today largely associated with nation-states and the demands for distinct cultural identity, were far more fluid in the era under discussion.
    This is not to say that Islam and the unique culture of the Muslims are not important elements of our story. I refer to the great importance of Islam to the development of Arab science throughout the text and have devoted an entire chapter to this vital relationship between faith and reason. Yet much of the research during this period went well beyond specific questions relating to the Islamic faith and was not generally carried out with an eye to establishing theological or doctrinal truths. At the same time, it is worth avoiding any confusion with the established notion of the “Islamic sciences,” which generally refers to strictly religious disciplines: jurisprudence, Koranic exegesis, the study of the hadith, or the collected sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and so on.
    A few words on my use of names and dates and my system of transliteration will also be useful. This work presents the enormous impact of Arab learning on the West—that is, on the lands of medieval Christendom and the states and societies they later produced. It seemed only sensible to use the Latinized forms instead of the Arabic names in the case of figures widely known to the Western world. Thus, I have used the Latin Averroes, not the Arabic Ibn Rushd, and Avicenna, not Ibn Sina. Less familiar figures have retained their Arabic names. For similar reasons, dates are presented in the traditional “Western” fashion—that is, anno Domini ( A.D .) and before Christ ( B.C .) In transliterating, I have chosen readability, familiarity, and convention over linguistic purity or consistency.
    Finally, a reference to the structure of The House of Wisdom , which pays tribute to the success of Arab scholars in measuring out the ever-changing pattern of night and day that determines the times of the five daily Muslim prayers. The book begins at sunset ( al~maghrib prayer), the traditional start of the day in the Middle East; then moves through the nightfall ( al~isha ) of the Christian Middle Ages; recounts the dawn ( al~fajr ) of the great age of Arab learning; soars toward the glory of midday ( al~zuhr ) with our central hero, Adelard of Bath, in the Near East; and concludes with the rich colors of afternoon ( al~asr ) that mark the end of the Age