Event

Exhibition | The World That You Know Through the Eyes of Muslim Geographers

Wednesday, August 1, 2018toFriday, February 1, 2019
Morrice Hall Islamic Studies Library, 1st floor, 3485 rue McTavish, Montreal, QC, H3A 0E1, CA

Did you ever wonder what it would have looked like to travel in the Middle Ages? And what geographical information was available to travelers at that time? The exhibition The World That You know through the eyes of Muslim Geographers aims at showing the invaluable contributions made by Muslim geographers and cartographers to the description and mapping of the world between the tenth and seventeenth centuries. 

The wealth of the geographical knowledge produced by Muslim geographers and cartographers fall into the following categories: travel reports, religious geography, nautical geography, mathematical geography and cartography.

The World That You Know Through the Eyes of Muslim Geographers exhibit displays the works of eight Muslim geographers who have made invaluable contributions to Islamic-Arabic geography; their treatises range from religious geography such as descriptions of pilgrimage travels to Mecca (a classic example of this genre is the Rihlah by Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217)) to nautical geographical works, like the Bahriyye of Piri Reis (d. 1554).

Curated by Samah Kasha, Senior Library Clerk at the Islamic Studies Library in collaboration with the Islamic Studies Library’s staff Charles Fletcher, Ghazaleh Ghanavizchian and Head Librarian Anaïs Salamon.

Image credit: Piri Reis. World Map, 1513. Map. In: Piri Reis, Fevzi Kurtoglu, Haydar Alpagot, and Fehmi Pekol. Piri Reis Kitabı Bahriye. Istanbul: Devlet basımevi, 1935. Print.

Opening hours for the Islamic Studies Library here.

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