04 August 2025

Marvellous “Properties” 2: Philosophy

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Now that we have concluded our reading of Ibn al-Jazzār’s Risāla fī’l-khawāss , the Epistle on Special Properties , let us see how it touche...
13 June 2025

Marvellous “Properties” 1: Authorities

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After completing our reading of Sirafī’s True Stories of the Seas and their Marvels , we have started work on the 10th-century Epistle on t...
18 September 2024

Wonders, Travels and Scientific Knowledge: Reading al-Sirafi

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We recently completed our reading of Sulaymān al-Mahrī’s Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres ( Mir’āt al-sallāk li-kurāt al-aflā...
08 March 2024

Heavenly Bodies and Their Accidents

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As we continue our weekly readings of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’at al-salak ( Mirror of Travellers ; see our previous post ), wondering about...
12 January 2024

Circles and Stars Between Cosmology and Cosmography

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The recently-opened Lisbon exhibition “The Emperor’s Gift: Circles of Knowledge” brings to light a recently-discovered 19th-century Arabic ...
13 October 2023

Cosmic Navigation and Cosmic Pilots

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As we embark on a new academic year with our Arabic reading group, we start more in earnest to tackle the pages of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’a...
23 June 2023

A Great Book Read in Good Company

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After months of slow travel between the dangerous reefs and sand banks of the Red Sea coast, tacking northwards through narrow channels, som...
24 March 2023

Libraries of the East, Libraries of the West

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Ten days of archival work in Cairo bring to my mind strongly the words of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “The East is not quite...