Casa Árabe recently published Volume nº 17-18 of “Awraq: Magazine of analysis and thought about the contemporary Arab and Islamic world,”, dedicated monographically to “Science in Al-Andalus.” This double issue is based on the international congress held with the same name from September 20 to 22, 2017 at Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba, on the occasion of the institution’s tenth anniversary.

For this occasion we relied on the invaluable participation of Mònica Rius, Professor of Arabic Studies at the Department of Classical, Romance and Semitic Philology at the University of Barcelona, and scientific coordinator of the congress. Rius, in addition to presenting the main authors of this monograph, will highlight the methodological debate that arises around concepts such as “science” and its “originality.” In order to assess the importance of Moorish science and discern what place is held exactly by the history of knowledge, it is necessary to perform in-depth analysis of the context in which it arose, ascertain the influences exerted upon it, determine the quality and innovation of its contributions, and assess the impact it had at both a local and global level. Context determines not only the vision of the universe arising from a specific culture, but also the concept of science with which it is instilled. In this case, Moorish science is a medieval science that arose within an Arabo-Islamic religious and political context which must basically be studied with complete dependence upon written texts, and a gender and class bias which must be constantly revised.

Taking part with Mónica Rius will be Javier Rosón, Casa Árabe’s coordinator in Cordoba.

Mònica Rius is a professor in the Arab Studies section of the Department of Classical, Romanesque and Semitic Philology at the University of Barcelona. She has studied the construction of new identities in Europe through the literature of authors of Arab origin. In addition, she has analyzed the relationship between science and literature in the colonial and postcolonial context of the Arab countries. She has been a guest professor at different domestic and foreign universities. She coordinated the European Master’s degree program in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities and was the director of the Master’s degree program in the Arab and Islamic World, both at the University of Barcelona.