Communities in different times and places in the world have given varying weight to forms of knowledge and the variety of processes by which knowledge is believed to be created. Bound to each society’s unique culture, these epistemological hierarchies are constantly in flux: Social and religious factors, for example, shaped such hierarchies by emphasizing some processes of creating knowledge (“ways of knowing”) over others, while those ways of knowing could in turn influence the society in which they were performed. In this study, I examine the changing status of mathematics in the epistemological hierarchy of the medieval Islamicate world, especially in terms of its relationship to other forms of natural and secular knowledge.
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