Trends and challenges in history of science in muslim countries today

This paper presents a brief survey on contemporary conditions and activities in the history of science, broadly conceived, in various, but not all Muslim countries. In this survey, I use the term history of science in a broad sense. It includes the exact sciences, mathematics, life sciences, material and technical sciences, and technologies from ancient times to the present. I use the term Muslim countries as a descriptor of countries with either a self-identification as Islamic or as countries whose population adheres in its majority to the one or the other orientation of this religion. I include colleagues contributing to the history of science in such a broadly conceived sense independently of their country of origin.

This survey aims not to be comprehensive, not even in the sense that it depicts all approaches or topics studied under the rubric of the history of science in at least some of those countries. On the one hand, there are many Muslim countries about which I could not obtain any information, either because I do not know any colleague there, or because I cannot read the languages used there for academic publications. On the other hand, themes related to various aspects of the history of sciences but studied outside this disciplinary frame were difficult to trace, because even my colleagues who generously helped me assemble the data for this brief survey were not sufficiently aware of such activities. My text could only be written thanks to the support I received from numerous colleagues in Iran, Qatar, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, and the US. [Publisher's text]