Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on various contexts in which scholars of the mathematical sciences worked in Islamicate societies between the ninth and the seventeenth centuries. It addresses courtly patronage, education, narratives about the sciences and their origins and case studies on conflicts. The book presents concrete material invalidating fundamental historiographical convictions held by historians of science and historians of Islamicate societies since the nineteenth century. These positions stated that there were no noteworthy scientific activities in Islamicate societies after 1200 and no courtly patronage supporting them with the exception of Ulugh Beg and that “the orthodoxy” rejected the ancient sciences and marginalized them which led to house arrests and edicts forbidding their teaching, that those sciences were excluded from the madrasas and at best taught in private settings or clandestinely.