Sulaymân al-Harâ’irî (1824-1877): his attempts to reconcile the Islamic civilization with modern science and mathematics education
Résumé
Who was Sulaymân al-Harâ’irî? Little is known about this enigmatic and controversial scholar. Born in Tunis in 1824, he settled in Paris in 1856 and died there in 1877. His unpublished manuscripts contain many translations into Arabic of French books, several of which are pertinent to mathematics. He translated arithmetic textbooks by Hippolyte Vernier, a surveying textbook by G. Frédéric Olivier and La Lande’s survey on uses of logarithms. He also drew up the plan for a comprehensive treatise on practical geometry, thus apparently laying the foundation for a Euro-Islamic hybrid mathematical knowledge. Keywords: Tunisia, Arabic language, translation, hybridization, arithmetic, logarithms, practical geometry