59The medieval Arabic- speaking world had southern Spain, or Andalusia,
as its far western border and then stretched across North Africa eastward
to include all of modern- day Iran. Its two major intellectual centers were
Cordova in the west and Baghdad in the east. As for its temporal extent,
what might be termed “the classical period” of Arabic philosophy and sci-
ence roughly began in the fi rst half of the ninth century with the “fi rst”
Arabic philosopher, al- Kindı ̄, and continued until the end of the twelfth,
when Persian began to emerge as a rival to Arabic for writing and think-
ing about philosophy and the “Aristotelian” approach to science began
gradually to be abandoned. Certainly one of the signifi cant contributions
of those working in the medieval Arabic- speaking world was the continu-
ation of a scientifi c tradition going back to the earliest Greek natural phi-
losophers, which attempted to explain the various natural phenomena
and physical features that make up our world.
The study of nature in the medieval Arabic- speaking world was char-
acterized by two currents that usually fl owed in parallel, while occasion-
ally crossing over and feeding one another: these were the intellectual
traditions associated with kala ̄m and falsafa. Although one is tempted to
translate these terms respectively as “theology” and “philosophy,” it is
not clear how helpful such labels are for understanding the differences
between the two, since both traditions were interested in roughly the
same set of questions, and their answers often shared common intuitions.
Perhaps a better way to distinguish between the two is to consider how the
CHAPTER 3Natural Knowledge in the Arabic Middle Ages
Jon McGinnis