ThinkHer

The popular practices in history of science narratives still carry the legacy of Eurocentric approaches shaped by European colonialism. For example, the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of European universities are frequently imagined as a long intellectual dusk, an age of theological dominance, institutional fragility, and scientific slowdown. Yet the same centuries contain a, parallel arc of knowledge-making that unfolded across Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, and Samarkand. Between roughly the eighth and thirteenth centuries, these cities formed a dense network of translation, observation, and mathematical innovation that modern historians refer to, cautiously and retrospectively, as the Islamic Golden Age. The contrast is not simply one of “stagnation versus progress,” as older narratives suggest, but of uneven institutional geography. While parts of Western Europe were reorganising after the collapse of Roman administrative systems, Abbasid Baghdad deve...