A Bridge to the Sky

In times of widespread Islamophobia, there is an understandable motivation for constructing scientific achievement as a counternarrative in popular discourse about Islam. Yet doing so has tended to impose an anachronistic conception of "science" onto pre-modern practices while also obscuring wider views of the intellectual, philosophical, and particularly the material context of medieval scientific achievement. An exemplary case study for this phenomenon is the figure of 'Abbas Ibn Firnas (d. 887), a celebrated early scientist, Córdoban courtier, and polymath. Ibn Firnas is best known today for conducting an early aeronautics experiment, which was commemorated by NASA. Some historians have called it the first successful human flight. The earliest and fullest account of Ibn Firnas' career in the Umayyad court includes the aeronautics experiment, and a great deal more on his achievements in the arts and design but has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. That account, as preserved in a volume of the Muqtabas of Ibn Hayyan (d. 1076), the Cordoban court chronicle, presents Ibn Firnas as both the leading intellectual of early Islamic Iberia and as a pioneering figure in the des