A Study on Schools of Geography throughout the History of Islamic Civilization

The science of geography, also literally called in Arabic "faces and slices of earth", involves a kind of land survey which emerged into Islam. There were several factors contributing to geography such as command of Islam to learning, Quran geographical themes, pilgrimage routes and wide-range Muslim conquests. This article attempted to examine two major schools of geography in the Islamic world under the influence of Hindi and Iranshahri schools of geography, which include 1. Iraqi school (Baghdad worldview) 2. Balkh school given the centrality of Mecca and the Muslim. Unlike the former, the Balkhi school more attention to the Mulsim world, to the extent that thee followers of Balkhi school consider Mecca as the centre of the world, where the geography is religious. The Balkhi School of geography has been based on Islamic data plus adopting a more scientific perspective, whereas the Iraqi school entails a more widespread and more comprehensive geography.