Having constituted a new epoch in human history and a new religiouspolitical order, the revealed religions challenged the tradition of Greek philosophy to adjust to, investigate, and make intelligible a religiouspolitical order based on prophecy, revelation, and the divine law. The challenge led certain Arab and Muslim philosophers to reassess the relative distance between the thought of the Greek masters, (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, in particular) and the doctrines propagated by the revealed religions, and to make use of such works as Plato's Republic and Laws, rather than Aristotle's Politics, when offering a philosophic account of the new religious–political phenomenon and of such new disciplines as the science of the divine law and the science of revealed theology.

Starting from the Greek definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and from the semantic richness of the Arabic word ḥikma, several fourth- and fifth-century writers tried to establish the position of philosophy in the Islamic cultural system by identifying it with wisdom. For them this wisdom is tantamount to the ‘eternal wisdom’ recorded in the ancient books and taught by the prophets. Philosophers are described as the prophets' disciples or witnesses. However, depicting philosophy as eternal wisdom only gives the discipline an illusory advantage. Ultimately it reduces it to pure repetition and therefore precludes any change.

This paper surveys the results established so far by the on-going research on the planetary theories in Arabic astronomy. The most important results of the Maragha astronomers are gathered here for the first time, and new areas for future research are delineated. The conclusions reached demonstrate that the Arabic astronomical works mentioned here not only elaborate the connection between Arabic astronomy and Copernicus, but also that such activities, namely the continuous reformulation of Greek astronomy, were not limited to a specific group of astronomers or to a specific geographical area. It is shown that such activities were spread over a period of more than seven hundred years, from the early eleventh till the sixteenth century, and over an area stretching from the Andalusian peninsula in the west to the farthest reaches of Central Asia in the east.

In a manuscript which is being studied here for the first time, al-Samaw'al (12th century) quotes a paragraph from al-Bīrūnī (11th century) which shows that the latter knew not only of Brahmagupta's method of quadratic interpolation, but also of another Indian method (called sankalt). Al-Samaw'al examines these methods, as well as linear interpolation, compares them, and evaluates their respective results. He also tries to improve them. In this article the author shows that al-Bīrūnī had used four methods of interpolation, two of which were of Indian origin; and that al-Samaw'al explicitly introduced a new way of evaluating these different methods. He also throws light on the active movement of research on numerical methods that constitutes the background to al-Bīrūmī's and al-Samaw'al's work, and uses modern means to evaluate the different methods and to justify the mathematicians' choices. The author has edited and translated al-Samaw'al's text in order to make it available to historians of Arabic and Indian mathematics. This allows them to follow the history and the mathematical arguments, and deepens our understanding of the importance to the development of mathematics of certain astronomical work. It also highlights the contribution of Indian mathematicians to the development of Arabic mathematics.