Beginning in the year 711 CE, Muslim armies based in North Africa took control of the vast majority of the Iberian peninsula, supplanting the Christian, Germanic Visigoths, who had themselves assumed power in the region in the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Muslims named the land al-Andalus, and for the next five centuries, Islamic religious and legal discourse and Arabic cultural and intellectual trends were preeminent on the peninsula. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Christian armies had regained control of most of what is now modern Spain and Portugal...

How do you represent a city that is and is not there? This has been the question for Jews since the days of the first destruction of the city in 586 BCE. It was the question for Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, who ventured to retrieve a city that Emperor Hadrian had condemned to oblivion. A few centuries later, as Muslim tradition asserts, the conquering caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb entered the city looking for the “holy house,” bayt al-maqdis, as the Arabs called the city. What he was shown by Bishop Sophronius was a glorious Roman shrine to the resurrection; what he was shown by his Jewish native informants was the ruins of the original Temple, now a dung heap...

Collaboration in collecting, cataloging, and digitizing information from ancient manuscripts and codices is critical for the preservation of texts on early mathematics and science in Arabic and other languages. New developments in technology help to shed light on the complex and often obscure pathways along which the history of science developed from Late Antiquity through the Islamic Middle Ages...