ABSTRACT

From its beginnings, in the seventh century, Islamic science should be understood in the context of the political and religious experience of Islamic civilization. With the rapid rise of the Islamic political order, which came to encompass the largest land mass any empire had ever controlled, it was natural that the exigencies of the developing empire would require solutions to problems that had never been encountered before. The mere vastness of the empire, even as early as the times of the early Umayyads, required that someone like the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwa¯n (r. 685-705) would make an attempt to streamline its various administrative departments that were up until that time still run in the same languages and styles of the previous Sasanian and Byzantine empires that the Islamic empire came to replace.