Stages of Map-making in Arab-Islamic Heritage: Historical Approach

Abstract

According to popular narratives in the Arab world, maps reflect the history of nations.The map is an important tool in geography in particular and in many other scientific disciplines, especially engineering, astronomy and urban planning.Explicitly, the history of cartography prioritizes accuracy in representing the correct distances and directions of familiar places.Historically, cartography and map-drawing dated back to ancient times.Due to the human need to represent various and important phenomena in ancient civilizations, one can argue that man's knowledge of map-drawing may have preceded his knowledge of writing.In the Middle Ages, Muslims made great progress in cartography, through which, they preserved the heritage of previous nations and added to them what suited the expansion of the Muslim empire in that period.Muslim cartography and map-painting came under the impact of civilizations that occurred in the pre-Islamic era.Therefore, the investigation of the various stages of development of the geographical map in the Arab-Islamic world should be approached in association with a scrutiny of the maps of ancient civilizations.Islamic cartography passed through seven stages and the maps of each stage are distinguished by special features.On this basis, the paper aims to explore the development of Islamic cartography in the past in details by investigating the pre-Al-Mamouniya 1 Maps (first stage) and Al-Mamouniya maps 2 (second stage).The paper will also examine the astronomical maps (third stage), the 1 Reference here to the Seventh Abbasid caliph Al-Ma'mun who reigned from 786 to 833 AD. 2 The map is considered one of the most famous Muslim maps.It is a colored map that surpassed Ptolemy's map.‫اإلنسانية‬ ‫والعلوم‬ ‫اآلداب‬ ‫كلية‬ ‫جملة‬ ‫ج‬ ‫والثالثون‬ ‫التاسع‬ ‫العدد‬ 4 -11 -regional maps (fourth stage), 3 Al-Idrisi's maps (fifth stage), the maritime maps (sixth stage) and the religious maps (seventh stage) in order to illustrate the importance of these maps.The ambiguity of the information that often appears on some maps and the inaccuracy of some data did not diminish the importance of Islamic maps and their unique position in Islamic heritage.