TOK situations from the Middle East and North Africa
Where a case comes from changes what it can show. These are the situations in the library drawn from the middle east and north africa.
- The Middle East and North Africa
The book that named algebra
Al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century treatise systematised equation-solving for inheritance shares and trade, and its title gave algebra its name while his own gave us…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Baghdad's translation century
Abbasid Baghdad funded the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic, and scholars there corrected, extended and argued with what they…
Enduring · History
- Truth
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Testing vision instead of theorising it
Ibn al-Haytham's eleventh-century optics rejected the reigning theory that eyes emit rays, arguing from designed experiments with dark chambers and controlled…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- The Middle East and North Africa
Freedom inside a system
An Arabic maqam performance improvises within a modal system with defined pathways, and a knowledgeable listener can tell when a player has gone somewhere they…
Enduring · The arts
- Justification
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Paintings that refuse the vanishing point
Persian and Mughal miniatures show multiple viewpoints at once and scale figures by importance rather than distance. European art history long described this…
Enduring · The arts
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- The Middle East and North Africa
Finding the direction of prayer
Determining the qibla from any city is a problem in spherical trigonometry, and medieval Islamic mathematicians developed sophisticated solutions and…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
The music the state could not stop
Algerian rai emerged from working-class Oran singing frankly about desire, alcohol and constraint, and was suppressed at different times by state broadcasters…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Values
- The Middle East and North Africa
Cracking hieroglyphs against a bilingual stone
Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs leaned on the Rosetta Stone's parallel texts and his knowledge of Coptic, and the proof was predictive: readings…
Enduring · History
- Interpretation
- Justification
- The Middle East and North Africa
The scrolls only a committee could read
For decades after their discovery, many Dead Sea Scrolls could be studied only by a small editorial team, while outside scholars waited on official publication…
Enduring · History
- Power
- The Middle East and North Africa
Measuring heat where people must work
Gulf states ban outdoor work during set summer hours, defined by clock and calendar rather than by measured heat stress on given sites, while researchers argue…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility