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or al-Ḳūhī , Abū Sahl Wayd̲j̲ān b. Rustam, mathematician and astronomer who was originally from Ṭabaristān. He worked in the second half of the 4th/10th century under the Būyid amīr s ʿAḍud al-Dawla and S̲h̲araf al-Dawla [ q.vv.] and collaborated with the chief scholars of the time, notably Abu ’l-Wafāʾ al-Būzad̲j̲ānī, al-Sid̲j̲zī, al-Ṣāg̲h̲ānī and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī. Under the latter’s direction, al-Kūhī took part in observation of the winter and summer solstices at S̲h̲īrāz (15 December 969 and 16 June 970), by means of a mer…

, Andalusian physician and philosopher, whose full name was Yūsuf b. Aḥmad , with the kunya s Abu ’l-Ḥad̲j̲d̲j̲ād̲j̲ and Abū Isḥāḳ. He was known in mediaeval Europe under the name of Alhagiag bin Thalmus, and Nallino (cf. RSO, xiii, 170) considers that the name Ṭumlūs may be a corruption of Bartholomaeus or Ptolemaeus. He was born at Alcira in about 560/1164, was a pupil of Ibn Widāḥ al-Lak̲h̲mī and perhaps of Ibn Rus̲h̲d (Averroes). He studied medicine and philosophy, and succeeded Ibn Rus̲h̲d as personal physician to the Almohad c…

(or Ḏj̲umayʿ ), Abu ’l-Makārim (Abu ’l-ʿAs̲h̲āʾir ) Hibat Allāh (Nathaniel) b. Zayn (al-Dīn) b. Ḥasan b. Ifrāʾīm b. YaʿḲūb b. Ismāʿīl , Jewish physician who received the honorific titles of S̲h̲ams al-riʾāsa and Ustād̲h̲ zamānih. Born at Fusṭāṭ, he was the disciple of Ibn al-ʿAynzarbī (d. 548/1153), entered the service of Saladin, and died in 594/1198. One of his pupils was Ibn Abi ’l-Bayān al-Isrāʾīlī (d. ca. 634/1236) and he became famous for having prevented a person in a cataleptic fit from being buried alive. He was the author of several works: (1) al-Irs̲h̲ād li-maṣāliḥ ¶ al-anfus wa …

, Abu Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad al-Dīn b. al-Bayṭār al-Mālaḳī , botanist and pharmacologist, born in Malaga at the end of the 6th/12th century. He probably belonged to the family of the same name whose existence in Malaga is attested by Ibn al-Abbār ( Muʿd̲j̲am , nos. 35, 165, 241). He studied in Seville and collected plants in the districts round the town with his teachers Abu ’l-ʿAbbās al-Nabātī, ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṣāliḥ and Abu ’l-Ḥad̲j̲d̲j̲ād̲j̲. In about 617/1220 he emigrated to the East: after crossing North Africa…

, Muwaffaḳ al-Dīn Abu ’l-ʿAbbās Ahmād b. al-Ḳāsim b. K̲h̲alīfa b. Yūnus al-K̲h̲azrad̲j̲ī , physician and bibliographer whose patronymic probably derives from the fact that one of his ancestors had a deformed hand. He belonged to a family of physicians and was born in Damascus, after 590/1194. He studied under the principal teachers of his time, notably Ibn al-Bayṭār [ q.v.], who taught him botany; with his father (d. 649/1251) and al-Raḥbī (d. 631/1233) he studied medicine, which he practised in the Nūrī hospital in Damascus and the Nāṣirī hospital in Ca…

, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim maslama b. Aḥmad al-Faraḍī , mathematician and astronomer, born in Madrid in the mid-4th/10th century, died in Cordova in about 398/1007. The facts which are known do not enable us to trace his biography in detail. He was clearly an important person since Ibn Ḥazm mentions him in his Ṭawḳ al-ḥamāma (ch. xiv). He clearly established himself at a very early age in Cordova, and was a pupil of the geometrician ʿAbd al-G̲h̲āfir b. Muḥammad. It must be supposed that he maintained contact with the circle of Hellenists…

, Abu ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥasan (or Ḥusayn) b. al-Hayt̲h̲am al-Baṣrī al-Miṣrī , was identified towards the end of the 19th century with the Alhazen , Avennathan and Avenetan of mediaeval Latin texts. He is one of the principal Arab mathematicians and, without any doubt, the best physicist. In respect of his biography we have numerous lacunae. He was born in Baṣra in about 354/965; during the reign of al-Ḥākim (386-411/996-1021) he went to Egypt where he tried to regulate the flow of the Nile. He abandoned this task when he realized its imposs…

, Karaite Jewish physician of Egypt, whose full name was Abu ’l-Faḍl Dāwūd b. Sulaymān b. Abi ’l-Bayān al-Isrāʾīlī . Born in the middle of the 6th/12th century, he studied with his co-religionists Ibn al-Nāḳid the oculist and Ibn D̲j̲āmiʿ, later the physician of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, and became the private physician of the Ayyūbid al-ʿĀdil (589/1193-658/1218) and professor at the Nāṣirī hospital. One of his disciples was Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa [ q.v.]. He died in 634/1236. He left the following works: (1) al-Dustūr al-bimāristānī fi ’l-adwiya ’l-murakkaba , ed. P. Sbath, in BIE, xv (1932-3), 13-80. …

, Abu ’l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (or Abū Manṣūr ʿAbd al-Raḥmān or Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Manṣūr ), astronomer and physician who lived in Persia at the opening of the 6th/12th century. He is occasionally confused with Ibn al-Hayt̲h̲am, al-K̲h̲āzinī and other authors bearing similar names and writing on the same topics. He was in origin a young Greek slave of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad, treasurer of the court in Marw; his master took it upon himself to give him the best possible education, but we have virtua…

, Abū ʿAlī Yaḥyā b. ʿĪsā , Arab physician of Bag̲h̲dād, known in the West under the names of Ben Gesla, Byngezla, Buhahylyha, etc. Of Christian origin, he embraced Islam under the influence of his teacher, the Muʿtazilī Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Walīd, on 11 Ḏj̲umādā II 466/11 February 1074. He was secretary to the Ḥanafī ḳāḍī of Bag̲h̲dād and studied medicine with Ṣāʿid b. Hibat Allāh, court physician to al-Muḳtadī. He lived in the al-Kark̲h̲ quarter, where he attended his neighbours and his friends without payment and even obtained the…

(a.), a term which appears in Arabic dictionaries with the meaning of “void” and, by extension, of “zero”. But it should be borne in mind that its doublet s-f-r signifies the opposite (Kazimirski, i, 1098b). Carra de Vaux (in JA [1917], ii, 459-460, and Penseurs de l’Islam , ii, Paris 1921, 102-10) drew attention to the conceptual opposition between the two roots “empty place” as against “written place”. In the latter sense, the Hebrew sefer and Persian sifr , etc. “book”, are encountered. Hence derive the mediaeval Latin tzifra , ziffrae , the Castilian cifra (1495), the French chiffre …

abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad ¶ (Ḥammū) b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb , descendant of an Andalusian family which emigrated to Morocco towards the end of the Middle Ages, was secretary to Mawlāy Ismāʿīl (1082/1672-1139/1727), who entrusted him with various diplomatic missions: one to Spain (1101/1690-1102/1691) for the ransoming of Muslim captives and another to Algiers (1103/1692) as a member of the suite of Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib al-Fāsī. He wrote the story of his journey in Spain under the title Riḥlat al-wazīr fī iftikāk al-asīr (ed. and Spanish tr. by A. Bustani, Larach…

or al-kās̲h̲ānī , g̲h̲iyāt̲h̲ al-dīn d̲j̲ams̲h̲īd b. masʿūd b. maḥmūd , Persian mathematician and astronomer who wrote in his mother tongue and in Arabic. Few biographical details are available, but it is known that during his lifetime he witnessed three eclipses of the moon, the first being visible at Kās̲h̲ān on 14 D̲h̲u ’l-Ḥid̲j̲d̲j̲a 808/2 June 1406. Dates occurring incidentally in his works mark a few stages in his life; in 809/1407 he finished his Risāla kamāliyya or Sullam al-samāʾ , which deals with the size or distances of the celestial bodies; in 816/1413 he completed the Zīd̲j̲-i…

, Abu ’l-Farad̲j̲ ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿIrāḳī , Nestorian monk, physician, philosopher and theologian known in mediaeval Europe under the name of Abulpharagius Abdalla Benattibus . He studied and worked at the ʿAḍudī hospital of Bag̲h̲dād, was the secretary of the katholikos Elias I, and died in 435/1043. The physicians Ibn Buṭlān, ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā and Abu ’l-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī were his pupils. An inventory of his works of Christian exegesis has been made by Graf: there may be mentioned especially the Firdaws al-Naṣrāniyya , the Arabic translation of the Diatessaron of Tatian, and the Fiḳh al-Naṣrāni…

, name of a family of astronomers from Farg̲h̲āna. The ¶ family consisted of the father, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim ʿAbd Allāh b. Amād̲j̲ūr al-Turkī and of his son Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī, and also of a freedman of the latter named Mufliḥ. They worked at Bag̲h̲dād and at S̲h̲īrāz between 272/885 and 321/933, making astronomical observations which have been in part preserved by Ibn Yūnus. The son devoted much of his attention to the determination of the limits of the latitude of the moon, observing that it reached greater lat…

, Abū Bakr Ḥāmid , physician and pharmacologist of Cordova, concerning whom we possess no other biographical notice than that by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (Cairo 1882, ii, 51). A contemporary of Ibn D̲j̲uld̲j̲ūl [ q.v.], he must have had a part in the rewriting of the text of Dioscorides in Arabic that was undertaken in Cordova, and died probably at the beginning of the 5th/11th century. He wrote a book on medicaments entitled al-Ḏj̲āmiʿ fi ’l-adwiya al-mufrada in which he lists the medicinal herbs in the alphabetical order of ancient Semitic, in the same way as al-Idrīsī. In each article he gives ¶ a de…

, nūr al-dīn abū isḥāḳ , called Alpetragius by mediaeval European authors, a Spanish-Arab astronomer, the disciple and friend of Ibn Ṭufayl (about 600/1200). His astronomical theory, the origins of which must be sought in the return to Aristotelianism initiated by Ibn Bād̲j̲d̲j̲a and other Arab philosophers of Spain like Ibn Ṭufayl and the astronomer Ḏj̲ābir b. Afiaḥ, involved the reintroduction of the idea of impetus roughly formulated by Simplicius (6th century A.D.), the aban…

(often written al-K̲h̲uwārizmī ), Abū D̲j̲aʿfar Muḥammad b. Mūsā . mathematician. astronomer and geographer, who utilised the Arabic language. He lived in the first half of the 3rd/9th century ( ca. 184-ca. 232/800-47), and should not be confused with two other important persons with the same nisba [ q.vv.]. We know that in his youth, during the caliphate of al-Maʾmūn, he worked in the Bayt al-Ḥikma [ q.v.] of Bag̲h̲dād, but we know very few other biographical details. However, his main works are well known to us, since many of them were translated into Latin i…

abū bakr muḥammad b. al-ḥasan (and also al-Ḥusayn), Arab mathematician and engineer, a native of al-Karad̲j̲ (in the D̲j̲ibāl, Iran) as G. Levi Delia Vida has demonstrated (in RSO, xiv (1933), 250) and not from the al-Kark̲h̲ district of Bag̲h̲dād, as was long believed. While still young, he went to Bag̲h̲dad where he held high positions in the administration and composed, towards 402/1011-2, his works al-Fak̲h̲rī , al-Kāfī and al-Badīʿ , in which he attempted to free algebra from the tutelage of geometry. He returned afterwards to his native…

, Muhad̲h̲d̲h̲ib al-Dīn Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Aḥmad , physician, born in Bag̲h̲dād in about 515/1122, who at first studied grammar and fiḳh in the Niẓāmiyya but rapidly turned to medicine. He next became physician in ordinary to the S̲h̲āh-i Arman in K̲h̲ilāṭ and acquired great wealth, then entered the service of Badr al-Dīn Luʾluʾ in Mārdīn, and finally went to al-Mawṣil. At the age of 75 he had the misfortune to become blind, but lived on until 610/1213. His chief work is entitled al-Muk̲h̲tārāt fi ’l-ṭībb (ed. Ḥaydarābād, 4 vols., 1362-4/1943-4); De Koning…