The Light of the World

"A work of admirable erudition, Robert Morrison’s annotated translation masterfully analyzes Ibn Nahmias’s treatise on theoretical astronomy, the only work of its kind written in Arabic by a Jewish author. Morrison preserves the work’s originality and its place in both Islamic and Jewish societies."—Sabine Schmidtke, Professor of Islamic Intellectual History, Institute for Advanced Study

"A work of remarkable significance, this book marks a milestone in scholarship on premodern Jewish science. Robert Morrison has made a major contribution to our understanding of the transmission of Islamic astronomy to Europe as well as how Islamic and Jewish scientific material reached and most likely influenced Renaissance astronomers, including Copernicus. His linguistic, historical, and technical skills have allowed him to deal in a careful, scholarly, and nonpolemical way with the interchanges between these various communities."—F. Jamil Ragep, Canada Research Chair in the History of Science in Islamic Societies, McGill University