Astrolabes and Ink

The scientists of the Islamic golden age, plainly told

Rania Tarawneh2 episodes2 min of audio213 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Apr 10, 20260:56137 plays Preview

Al-Zahrawi's Two Hundred Instruments

A tenth-century surgeon in Cordoba drew and described two hundred tools, from forceps to catgut sutures, many still in use. Rania opens his thirty-volume encyclopaedia and picks the pages that changed…

S1 · E1Dec 26, 20250:5676 plays Members

Ibn al-Haytham Locks Himself in a Dark Room

In Cairo around 1020, a disgraced engineer under house arrest built a dark chamber with a pinhole and proved how vision works. Rania walks through the experiment that founded optics.

About the show

Rania Tarawneh is a physicist from Amman who got tired of hearing the Islamic golden age summarised in a single sentence about algebra, so she started reading the original manuscripts herself. Astrolabes and Ink is her weekly solo series, around thirty-five minutes an episode, about the scientists, doctors, astronomers and engineers who worked between Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo and Samarkand from the eighth to the fifteenth century. Each episode takes one person or one problem: Ibn al-Haytham and the experiment that founded optics, al-Zahrawi's surgical instruments, the Banu Musa brothers and their self-trimming lamp, Ulugh Beg's observatory, the Maragha astronomers whose models reached Copernicus. Rania explains the actual science as clearly as she can, says honestly where the record is thin, and resists both the myth-making and the dismissal. For curious listeners with no background in physics, teachers who want better material, and anyone who has looked up at a star with an Arabic name and wondered why.

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