Who the atlas counts as a figure
Nubala is an atlas of Islamic civilisation, and the test it applies is participation in that civilisation rather than membership of the faith. The clearest proof is on the hub of its most prestigious era: Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian from al-Hira, and Thabit ibn Qurra, a Sabian from Harran, are both Golden Age figures, because the translation movement that carried Greek science into Arabic ran through them.
Nubala · Published · 8 min read
The second thing the corpus says about itself is geographical. Its 29 cities sit in 16 modern countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, and the single largest group of figures is not Arab: Persians, Turks, Berbers, West Africans, South Asians and Malays together outnumber them comfortably. An atlas organised around one language or one ethnicity would be a quarter of the size and a different book.
The non-Muslim and the convert figures
Five figures make the inclusion rule explicit, and each is worth reading for a different reason.
Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 809 to 873, was a Nestorian Christian who rendered Galen, Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle into Arabic and Syriac, and whose page credits him with turning translation from a craft into a discipline. Thabit ibn Qurra, 826 to 901, was a Sabian of Harran, a translator of Greek mathematics who also worked on amicable numbers and the theory of parallels. Al-Battani, about 858 to 929, came from a family of Sabian background in the same town; his great work of astronomical tables carries the name in its title, Kitab al-Zij al-Sabi.
Two more crossed over in adult life. Rashid al-Din Hamadani, 1247 to 1318, was born into a Jewish family in Hamadan, converted around the age of thirty, and rose to be vizier to the Ilkhanid Mongol rulers and the author of one of the great universal histories. Ibrahim Muteferrika, 1674 to 1745, was a Hungarian-born convert who set up the first Muslim-owned Arabic-script printing press in the Ottoman Empire in 1729.
A sixth case runs the other way. Mian Tansen, about 1500 to 1586, was the Hindu musician of Akbar's court who converted late in life. He is in the atlas for the music, which was made in and for a Mughal court - the same reasoning that puts a Christian translator in Abbasid Baghdad.
Sixteen countries, and where the cities are not
The 29 city hubs cover Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Arabia, Palestine, Mali, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Indonesia. The weighting is heavy at one end: Baghdad carries 36 figures, Cairo 29, Damascus 24, Delhi and Istanbul 19 each, Cordoba 18. At the other end, Aceh, Ajmer and Maragheh carry one figure each.
Fourteen of the 153 figures are on no city page at all, and they are not randomly distributed. They are, in the main, the Sahelian and the Southeast Asian figures: Nana Asma'u, Usman dan Fodio and Muhammad Bello of the Sokoto caliphate; Queen Amina of Zazzau and Idris Alooma in what is now northern Nigeria and Chad; Samori Ture in the Mande world; Sunan Ampel, Sunan Kalijaga and Hamka in the Indonesian archipelago.
So the city index is a real coverage gap rather than a judgement: Sokoto, Kano, Gwalior, Demak and Palembang are not in the atlas, so the figures whose work happened there are reachable only through their era hubs and through search. The era hubs are where that part of the corpus actually lives.
| Era | Figures | Organised by |
|---|---|---|
| The Golden Age | 38 | A judgement about an age of science and philosophy |
| The Ottoman Empire | 18 | A dynasty, 1299 to 1922 |
| The Mughal Empire | 18 | A dynasty, in the Indian subcontinent |
| Al-Andalus | 16 | A region, the Iberian peninsula |
| Thinkers & Poets | 16 | A theme, deliberately crossing centuries |
| Africa | 11 | A continent |
| The Mamluk Sultanate | 9 | A dynasty, in Egypt and Syria |
| Modern Reformers | 8 | A movement, about 1800 to 1940 |
| Central Asia | 6 | A region, in the Timurid period |
| The Crusades Era | 6 | A war |
| Southeast Asia | 4 | A region, from about 1400 |
| The Seljuk World | 3 | A dynasty |
What a figure is included for
Each figure carries one to several role labels, and the distribution says what kind of contribution the atlas is recording. Scholar is the commonest, on 66 of the 153. Then ruler on 45 and military leader on 36 - this is still a political history as well as an intellectual one. Then, and this is the interesting one, patron on 27.
The patron label is the atlas's most consequential editorial decision. It means that paying for the work counts as a contribution to it. Zubaida bint Ja'far is in the atlas for the Darb Zubaida, the wells and stations along the pilgrimage road, not for anything she wrote. Al-Hakam II is in for a library of 400,000 volumes in Cordoba. Ulugh Beg is in for both - he funded the Samarkand observatory and worked in it. Nizam al-Mulk is in as the vizier who built the madrasa system that employed the scholars.
Three smaller labels tell you what else is being counted. Mystic, on 24 figures, puts Rumi, Ibn Arabi and Moinuddin Chishti on the same footing as the mathematicians. Educator, on 20, covers the people who built institutions rather than arguments - Fatima al-Fihri and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a thousand years apart, for the same kind of act. Resistance leader, on 6, covers the nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures who fought colonial expansion, among them Emir Abd el-Kader, Imam Shamil and Omar al-Mukhtar.
The women, and what their distribution shows
The Women Who Shaped History collection holds 14 figures, and they are spread across eight different eras rather than clustered in one - which is itself the finding. Rule, patronage, scholarship and poetry are all represented, in every period the atlas covers.
They are: Fatima al-Fihri and Zubaida bint Ja'far in the Golden Age; Lubna of Cordoba, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi and Sayyida al-Hurra in al-Andalus; Shajara al-Durr under the Mamluks; Razia Sultana and Jahanara Begum in the Mughal world; Hurrem Sultan and Kosem Sultan in the Ottoman; Arwa al-Sulayhi among the Thinkers & Poets; Gawhar Shad in Central Asia; and Nana Asma'u and Queen Amina of Zazzau in Africa.
Reading the collection in era order is the single quickest way to see what the atlas is claiming about the civilisation: not that women appear as exceptions in a particular golden moment, but that they appear in every period it covers, in four different kinds of role.
- 153 figures, 12 eras, 29 cities in 16 modern countries, 10 collections.
- At least five figures were not Muslims by birth, including two on the Golden Age hub.
- 27 figures are labelled patron - paying for the work counts as taking part in it.
- 14 figures are on no city page, concentrated in the Sahel and Southeast Asia.
- The thinnest eras are Southeast Asia at four figures and The Seljuk World at three.
Where the corpus is thin, stated plainly
Three gaps are worth naming, because a reader should know them before drawing conclusions from a count.
The Sahel and Southeast Asia are under-covered relative to their populations and their histories: 11 figures for Africa and 4 for Southeast Asia, against 38 for the Golden Age. Part of that is the state of the scholarship in English - see how to read the sources a figure page cites, where the same unevenness shows up in the bibliographies - and part is editorial.
Islamic law as a discipline is thinly represented. Fifteen figures carry the jurist label, and nearly every one of them is here for something else as well - Ibn Rushd for philosophy, Ibn Khaldun for history, Ibn Battuta for travel. A reader looking for the formation of the legal schools will not find it in this corpus.
And the corpus stops at 1981, with the death of Hamka in Indonesia. There is nothing from the last four decades, which is a defensible decision for a historical reference and a real limit on it.
None of those gaps is hidden by the interface, which is the point of writing them down. The counts on the era hubs are the counts; what this guide adds is what they imply.
Questions readers ask
Were all the figures in this atlas Muslim?
No. Hunayn ibn Ishaq was a Nestorian Christian, Thabit ibn Qurra a Sabian, and Al-Battani came from a Sabian family. Rashid al-Din Hamadani was born Jewish and Ibrahim Muteferrika a Hungarian Christian; both converted as adults. The test is participation in the civilisation, not faith.
How many countries does the atlas cover?
Its 29 city hubs sit in 16 modern countries, from Morocco and Mali to Uzbekistan and Indonesia. The 12 era hubs reach further, because 14 figures - mostly Sahelian and Southeast Asian - are on no city page at all.
Why are patrons included alongside scientists?
Because funding the work is treated as part of the work. Twenty-seven figures carry the patron label, among them Zubaida bint Ja'far for the pilgrimage-road wells, Al-Hakam II for the Cordoba library and Nizam al-Mulk for the madrasa system.
How many women are in the atlas?
The Women Who Shaped History collection holds 14 figures, spread across eight of the twelve eras - rulers, patrons, scholars and poets, in every period the atlas covers.
Why does the atlas stop in 1981?
Because the latest figure in it, Hamka, died that year. The corpus is historical and covers about 1,300 years from Tariq ibn Ziyad onwards; nothing from the last four decades is included.
Sources
- Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement (Routledge, 1998) - cited on the Hunayn ibn Ishaq page.
- Roshdi Rashed, Thabit ibn Qurra: Science and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Baghdad (De Gruyter, 2009) - cited on the Thabit ibn Qurra page.
- Fatema Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) - cited on the Arwa al-Sulayhi, Sayyida al-Hurra and Shajara al-Durr pages.
- John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill, 2003) - cited on the Askia Muhammad page.
- Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (Yale University Press, 1993) - cited on the Southeast Asian pages.
- Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack, Collected Works of Nana Asma'u (Michigan State University Press, 1997) - cited on the Nana Asma'u page.
Counts in this guide are derived from the atlas data itself, so the prose cannot drift from the corpus. How to read the sources a figure page cites explains how the bibliographies are built and what each kind of work can carry.