prominent topic, with further contributions in physics, astronomy, mechanics, cosmology, and psychology. The questions addressed largely consist of the puzzles of the curious layman (e.g. why is the sky sometimes red, how do flies stick to walls, etc.), presented in the style of the Greek problemata literature. The arguments offered in response are, as one would expect, essentially Aristotelian...

provides us with several answers. First, in recent decades there has been a revival of homeopathic medicine, especially in Germany. The renewed popularity among patients of homeopathic remedies must at least in part be attributed to dissatisfaction with "scientific medicine", the elite of which seems primarily interested in modem medicine's technical tools; as Roy Porter put it in his perceptiv...

BACKGROUND Ala-al-din abu Al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi, known as Ibn al-Nafis (1210-1288 AD), was a Muslim Syrian physician primarily famous for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The most voluminous of his books is Alshamel fi Sana'at tebbi'at, which is a comprehensive medical encyclopedia. It comprised 300 volumes of notes, from which only ...

In the context of direct and reflection based extension mechanisms for the Jinni 2000 Java based Prolog system, we discuss the design and the implementation of a reflection based Prolog to Java interface. While the presence of dynamic type information on both the Prolog and the Java sides allows us to automate data conversion between method parameters, the presence of subtyping and method overl...

A novel bacterial strain, designated ANL-iso2(T), was obtained from an enrichment culture inoculated with a mixture of soda lake sediments by using isobutyronitrile (iBN) as the carbon, energy and nitrogen source at pH 10. The enrichment resulted in a stable binary culture containing iBN-degrading Gram-positive rods and a satellite Gram-negative gammaproteobacterium Marinospirillum sp. strain (...

T Ferdous al-Hekma (Paradise of Wisdom) is one of the oldest medical texts in the Islamic world written in Arabic in 850 AD by Ali ibn Raban Tabari. He was a Persian physician who moved from Tabaristan (Mazandaran province of modern day Iran) to Samarra during the reign of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-861 AD). We studied the book of Ferdous al-Hekma fil-Tibb, in an attempt to comprehen...

A t e r t h e c o m i n g o f P r o p h e t Muhammad, the Arabian tribes, in a great burst of expansionist energy, swept over Western Asia and North Africa. They disrupted, but did not destroy the Eastern Roman Empire, which had survived the barbarian onslaughts that had wiped out the empire in the West. The Eastern Empire, particularly after the Arabian conquests, came to be known as Byzantine...

Abu Ja'far Ahmad b. Abi Khalid Ibn al-Jazzar, born in Qayrawan, the medieval capital of Tunisia, hailed from a family of physicians. ' His father IbrThim was a doctor, as was his paternal uncle Abu Bakr. He studied with the famous Jewish philosopher and physician Ishaq b. Sulayman al-Isra'ili (c. 243/855-343/955),2 who had been a student of Ishaq ibn 'Imran (d. 296/908),3 and who at the age of ...

After years of painstaking research Dr. Giuseppe Scattolin has at last published his critical edition of Ibn al-Fa≠rid ̋'s D|wa≠n. While Ibn al-Fa≠rid ̋ lived during the Ayyubid period, his verse was a dominant influence on later Arabic poetry composed under the Mamluks. Moreover, his verse and mystical ideas were, at times, sources of contention among factions of ulama during Mamluk rule, while ...

This autobiography already makes for absolutely fascinating reading. Ibn Khaldūn lived an itinerant life serving as a magistrate for—in modern geographic terms— Spanish, Moroccan, Tunisian and Egyptian Islamic courts. In that function in Granada, Spain, he negotiated treaties with the Christian Spanish crown (with Pedro the Cruel, which does not sound too encouraging). The autobiography follows...