Determann tries to change that perception in his new book, Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East. He chronicles the work and achievements of various scientists and astronomers in the region, from the first formal space observatories in the late 1800s to plans for a Mars mission in 2020.

I spoke with Determann about this new period in history. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Marina Koren: What made you decide to leave the Golden Age behind and focus on modern-day space research in the Middle East?

Jörg Matthias Determann: I found modern astronomy and space science in the Arab world, the kind of research that has existed since 1800, to be broadly an under-researched topic, compared with all the research that we have on medieval and premodern Arabic and Islamic science. And there was long the idea that science was one thing that moved through history, and the Arabs had their role in that history only at a certain point. There was this narrative where science emerged thousands of years ago with the ancient Babylonians, perhaps the ancient Chinese as well, and then it would move on to the Romans and the Greeks, and then science was inherited by the Arabs and they preserved it and worked a little bit on it, and then the Arabs passed science on to Europe, when Europe had its renaissance, and then science moved to America, which is now the world center of science.

So we have a lot of books that focus on the role of medieval Arab and Muslim thinkers preserving and translating and modifying and developing ancient Greek or Persian knowledge, and then we have a lot of scholarship on how this knowledge was then transferred to early modern Europe. According to these narratives, just as you had a scientific revolution in the West, in Europe, with Galileo, with Isaac Newton, you had an end to the Golden Age in the Arab and Muslim world. And this narrative is quite problematic.

Koren: Why?

Determann: I should say it’s not just a Western narrative. It’s also a narrative that exists in the Arab world itself. It’s dangerous to be too nostalgic about the science that happened in the Arab and Muslim world a thousand years ago. It feeds into a very backward-looking perspective. Arabs might think, oh, a thousand years ago, we had this Golden Age when our science was superior, when our science was the best in the world. What went wrong? Maybe we need to go back to how Islam was 100 years ago, maybe we need to go back to how our society was a thousand years ago. This kind of overemphasis on a Golden Age might even contribute to fundamentalism, to Salafism, to past versions of Islam.

So I wanted to see the Arab scientists and astronauts and astronomers we have in the world today. We have universities and research institutions across the Arab world, and yet we know relatively little about what’s going on there. Maybe some educated people, both in the Arab world and in the West, could probably name a few medieval Arabic scholars. But I think very few people could name an Arab astronaut or scientist, even in many Arab countries. There’s little awareness of scientists in the Arab world—and especially compared to other figures.