Since this is my last gesture as President of the Association I should like to thank you all warmly for the honor you have done me in electing me as President and for the opportunity of working with the Board of Directors and with the Secretary, Michael Bonine, on your behalf. It also happens that I am just about to finish a book on the history of Islamic societies. In a very different way this project has also been a special privilege. I have been able to branch out from my basic and abiding interest in the Arab Middle East and from my studies in early Islamic history to learn something about Muslim peoples all over the world. To learn so much and to work out a way of presenting such a large subject in a coherent way has made this a wonderfully rewarding project. Like a great puzzle, it has occupied my mind for seven years. I hope that the book I am writing will return the rewards of this learning to the reader.

In Recent Years, many discoveries in the history of Islamic mathematics have not been reported outside the specialist literature, even though they raise issues of interest to a larger audience. Thus, our aim in writing this survey is to provide to scholars of Islamic culture an account of the major themes and discoveries of the last decade of research on the history of mathematics in the Islamic world. However, the subject of mathematics comprised much more than what a modern mathematician might think of as belonging to mathematics, so our survey is an overview of what may best be called the “mathematical sciences” in Islam; that is, in addition to such topics as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry we will also be interested in mechanics, optics, and mathematical instruments.

Arabic Papyrology is relevant to more than the first three hundred years of Islamic Egypt. In its larger sense, papyrology is the use of documentary sources for the study of civilization. To limit the definition of Arabic papyrology by the medium on which documents are written would be to ignore the possibility of millenia-long historical investigation. Analysis of time-series of like documents—for example, marriage or sales contracts—without regard to the change from papyrus to paper, will permit the unprecedented study of a particular institution over time, as well as understanding of variations in language and formulary. Arabic papyrology, hence, presents us with the possibility of in-depth cross-cultural studies of institutions which lie at the very foundations of Middle Eastern civilization.