Derivation of the Word ‘Iqlīm’

The ancient Greeks used the word to refer to an area of land whose parts were all ‘inclined’ at the same angle in relation to the rays of the sun—in modern terms, to an area belonging to the same latitude. Such a definition relies on the notion that the earth is spherical (Lamb, 714).

Although many Muslim geographers and lexicographers believed the word iqlīm to be an Arabicised form of the Greek …