5. The World According to the Andalusians: Cultural Flows and Geography: By Shiva Balaghi, Program in Near Eastern Studies, New York University The scientists of the medieval Islamic world played a big part in helping to determine the modern conception of the world as we know it -- the shape and form of the planet earth, the organization of bodies of water, the movement of the planets. The relationship of man to the world has been largely shaped by the geographers, botanists, astronomers, geologists, physicists, physicians, and philosophers who often traveled from one intellectual center of the medieval Islamic world to another. Traveling from Timbuktu to Baghdad, from Damascus to Cordoba, from Samarkand to Cairo, they studied at the major universities of the time. Usually, these scholars were fluent in a number of languages. During the "golden age of Islam" many such scholars converged onto the cities of Andalusia, where they became interlocutors of knowledge and information, studying at its universities and making good use of its libraries. Click here for full text Get Adobe Acrobat Reader here