The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) - Hardcover

Mohammad Sadegh Ansari

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009502549 ISBN 13: 9781009502542

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

This book expands our understanding of the place and tools of musical knowledge production in the Islamic world.

About this title

About the Author

How did the pre-modern Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualize, produce, and disseminate scientific knowledge? What can we learn about pre-modern Islamic civilizations from the way they examined and studied the universe? In answering these fundamental questions, Mohammad Sadegh Ansari provides a unique perspective for the study of both musicology and intellectual history. Widely considered to be an art today,music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as one of the four branches of the mathematical sciences, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy; indeed, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. This innovative book raises fascinating questions about how designating music a 'science rather than an 'art' impacts our understanding of truth, and reconstructs a richly holistic medieval system of knowledge in the process.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009502549
• ISBN 13: 9781009502542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264