The interest given to Islamic geography and nautical sciences by a large number of authors mirrors its importance. Whether human geography,[1] or nautical sciences,[2] or other branches of the subject,[3] there is ample information and a great choice of reference material. General syntheses by one single author have also been abundant; a good one is by De Vaux,[4] and another is by Khratchokovsky.[5] The latter is 919 pages long, covering the works of 260 Muslim geographers, and it includes a bibliography of 54 pages, a work so thorough that it took its author forty years to complete ‘A work of a lifetime gifted to us,’ says M. Canard in his review of it.[6]

However, the abundance of works does not mean the matter is as adequately dealt with as one would wish. As usual, some crucial issues have remained obscured such as, for instance, the impact of Islamic nautical science on subsequent 15^th–16^th century discoveries. Another flaw is the constant attribution of Islamic geographical achievements to Greek predecessors even if such Greek influence limited itself to Ptolemy’s writing, focusing on place locations, with little or no contribution to other branches of the subject such as human geography or nautical science; this narrow focus is wrongly widened to generalised influence on Muslim geography.

The other problem is the tendency amongst many to inflate the works of the 10^th century geographer al-Mas’udi (912-957) and set aside the rest.[7] Al-Mas’udi’s Muruj al-Dhahab wa Ma'adin al-Jawhar (Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems) at best can compare to the works of the likes of al-Idrisi, al-Biruni, Yaqut, and al-Muqaddasi.[8] Other geographers accomplished much more. Al-Biruni  (973-1050), for instance, wrote the best material on the subject; his accomplishments, as briefly outlined here, included creating the branch of mathematical geography, determining with remarkable precision the coordinates of a number of places, introducing a simplified method of stereographic projection, describing India , explaining the occurrence of natural springs and of artificial wells by laws of hydrostatics, reflections on the Indus valley, such as that it was probably an ancient sea-basin which had gradually filed up with alluviums,[9] and scientific comments on the distribution of land and water on the face of the globe.[10]

Many authors dealing with Islamic geography, such as Ronan, also hold that Muslim geography declined after al-Masudi's death, which is incorrect. A brief look at any source shows that Muslim geography, in fact, peaked following al-Masudi's death. Ronan, like Renan, also blames the decline of both Muslim geography and society on the ‘heavy hand of Islam' in the 13^th century[11] (an issue to be considered in the final part of this work), whilst ignoring that the Muslim land in the 13^th century was devastated by invasions (crusades, Mongols, the loss of Muslim Spain, etc,) which destroyed scholarship, and killed geographical inquiry. One geographer, Yaqut, for instance, in the wake of the bloody Mongol devastation of eastern Islam in 1220 had to flee the city of Merw, where he was working on his geographical encyclopaedia, with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, clutching his manuscripts, running across Persia  to Mosul.[12]

Another problem relates to some modern studies of Muslim science and civilisation, which are very poor compared to those that preceded them up to a century; the article by Grosset Grange and H. Rouquette on Islamic nautical science in Rashed’s encyclopaedia of Arabic science,[13] for instance, is of very poor quality compared to works such as by Ferrand which are nearly a century older.[14]

Another problem relates to the contradictory nature of writing, which one finds in the same author, censuring and praising Islamic science at once. Hence, Tolmacheva, for instance, says:

‘It is thus obvious that while Islamic geography faithfully preserved ancient and foreign geographical concepts, it failed to produce its own form or to develop a viable synthesis of the old forms with the-new information. Its chief value, then, is not in the field of theory, but in the facts it accumulated, particularly because the total volume of preserved data is very considerable. Its significance goes beyond geography into other areas of knowledge, at least in part because of the prevalence of descriptive geography… and it was also customary to discuss other sciences in the introductions to geographical works. For some parts of the world, or certain periods of their history, medieval Islamic geographers provide major, if not the only, sources of information. Their works are thus invaluable and often indispensable to the study of history and historical ethnography, as well as historical geography and the history of science.’[15]

From what has just preceded, it becomes, thus, necessary to approach the subject from a more searching perspective.