ABSTRACT
In military technology and international trade, the West began casting its shadow on Muslim regimes. In Iran, Pietro della Valle met a cosmopolitan society of intellectuals from all over the Muslim world, a number of whom were devoted to mathematics and astronomy. One of them, Zayn al-Din, was vaguely aware of scientific developments in the West. Sometime between 1660 and 1664, Noel Durret's astronomy was translated to Arabic, still the language of science throughout the Muslim world. As in the Abbasid period and Caliph Mansur's stomach ailment in Baghdad, medicine led the way in this latest transfer of knowledge, this time from the transformed West back to Islamdom. The wall between western Christendom and Islamdom looked for a moment to be coming down. In turn, further decline assured that reformers would increasingly consider Western knowledge and expertise to be not only of value but necessary for survival.
