The Science of Music

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.