Two pages from a manuscript of the Koran copied on parchment in broken cursive script

Western historians have often argued that Islamic civilization made its greatest mistake in the fifteenth century when it refused to accept the printing press, for this failure supposedly condemned Islamic civilization to isolation from the mainstream of knowledge. Although Muslims did not use the printing press until the eighteenth century, and then only tentatively, they had other means of...

During the early centuries of Islamic rule the cultural history of western Islamic lands was concentrated in two areas. One is the province of Ifriqiya under the rule of the Aghlabid dynasty of governors, with its new capital of Qayrawan and its fortified coastal cities like Sus (modern Sousse). The other is al-Andalus, the generic name given to all parts of the...