ABSTRACT
The interest in plant life evinced by Muslims was from its earliest stages closely tied to the task of translation. The centuries following al-Ama witnessed a marked growth in the works Muslims devoted to the description of plant life, particularly in those non-Arab lands recently brought into the fold of the Islamic faith. The work, extant today in manuscript form in two recensions, one found in Istanbul, the second in Tehran, is an ambitious attempt to give a synoptic description of the plant life of the Mediterranean world. The three works al-Sharf al-Idrs composed while resident in Palermo should thus be viewed as a significant part of the translation project undertaken in Sicily following the Norman conquest of that island. Much has been made of Baghdad as the primary point through which classical Greek learning passed into the Islamic world and Toledo as the point at which it returned to Christendom in Islamic garb.
