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Amira Bennison's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Amira Bennison recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Amira Bennison's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Classical Heritage in Islam

The influence of classical antiquity on the religious disciplines, theology, mysticism and law of Islam cannot be overestimated. This work demonstrates the significance of the classical heritage by drawing together a great range of literary renderings, paraphrases, commentaries and imitations, as well as independent Islamic elaborations. Professor Rosenthal's collection includes the work of early authors, authors of the Golden Age and later writers who imitated their works. The Classical Heritage in Islam reveals that the Muslim adoption of and dependence on classical texts was not... more
Recommended by Amira Bennison, and 1 others.

Amira BennisonWestern civilisation has tended to leave out Islam, even though the Islamic world inspired Europe as much as Greece and Rome did. (Source)

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2

Medieval Islamic Medicine

Medieval Islamic Medicine The medical tradition that developed in the lands of Islam during the medieval period (c. 650-1500) has, like few others, influenced the fates and fortunes of countless human beings. This title tells the story of contact and cultural exchange across countries and creeds, affecting many people from kings to the common crowd. less
Recommended by Amira Bennison, and 1 others.

Amira BennisonThe Koran says, ‘For every disease, Allah has given a cure.’ It was this belief that there is a cure for every disease that encouraged early Muslims to engage in biomedical research. (Source)

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3
From the middle of the eighth century to the tenth century, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, botany and medicine, that were not available throughout the eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East, were translated into Arabic.
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture explores the major social, political and ideological factors that occasioned the unprecedented translation movement from Greek into Arabic in Baghdad, the newly founded capital of the Arab dynasty of the 'Abbasids', during the first two...
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Recommended by Peter Adamson, Amira Bennison, and 2 others.

Peter AdamsonAbout an enormous movement when Greek works of science and philosophy were translated into Arabic. (Source)

Amira BennisonGutas is very keen to flag up the role of the caliphs as patrons committed to an intellectual project. (Source)

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4
George Saliba follows the rise and fall of the Islamic scientific tradition, and the relationship of Islamic science to European science during the Renaissance. less
Recommended by Amira Bennison, and 1 others.

Amira BennisonThe thriving scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpins a lot of things that happen in the European Renaissance. (Source)

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5

Science and Islam

A History

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.

From Musa al-Khwarizmi, who developed algebra in ninth-century Baghdad, to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston, Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history’s most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science...
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Recommended by Amira Bennison, and 1 others.

Amira BennisonThis book looks at different areas of science in which the Islamic world excelled as well as the contemporary myth of Islam being backward and not promoting scientific thought. (Source)

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