Introduction

Abstract

The history of arithmetic in Islam is not yet sufficiently known. When, in the nineteenth century, the attention of the scholarly world was attracted by the fact that the so-called Arabic numerals were known to the medieval arithmeticians in Islam and Christdendom as ḥuruf al-Hind or ḥurūf al-ghubār, (i. e. Hindu or dust letters), efforts were started to investigate the origins of these numerals. These efforts resulted in a small book, Hindu-Arabic Numerals [96], and several articles, the drift of which has not yet ceased. In his Index Islamicus, covering articles that appeared in Western languages between 1905 and 1965, J. D. Pearson pointed out ninety-eight items on general mathematics, of which twenty-nine were on the numerals.