ABSTRACT
A striking feature of formative and medieval perceptions of the scholarly field was the various attempts to organize the sciences1 into broad schemes of classification. Most authors who wrote on this subject either implicitly included or explicitly referred to a difference between the religious or transmitted sciences (al-^ulnm al-shar^ lya/al-naqllya), such as jurisprudence ( fiqh), Quranic exegesis (tafslr) and the knowledge of the variant readings of the Quran (qirm 6a), and the ancient, foreign, rational or philosophical sciences (^ulnm al-awm 6il/al-^ajam, al-^ulnm al-qadlma/ al-^aqllya/al-.ikmlya), such as medicine, logic and astronomy/astrology.2 Authors did not necessarily attach notions of licit and illicit to these two sets of disciplines.3
