The historian and geographer, Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Hussain Ibn Ali Al Masudi (895-957 CE) was a scion of an age when Islamic scholarship had overcome the challenge of Greek rationalism, and having thrown off the yoke of deductive absurdity, found its own expression in the inductive empiricism of the Qur’an. The history of this challenge and the aftermath of ensuing battles has defined the...

Civilizations change when the paradigms that govern them change. Humans relate to themselves and to each other through transcendental values firmly imbedded in basic frameworks. These values define how a society looks upon itself, how it interacts with other societies and its place in history. For instance, in the Middle Ages, most people believed that the earth was flat. The paradigm of a flat...