Sir

Giovanni Bignami in his Millennium Essay (Nature 404, 227; 2000) qualified two Persian thinkers, Avicenna and Omar Khayyàm, as belonging to the Arabic world. Occidental writers frequently take “Muslim” to mean “Arab” and consider Islamic culture to be Arabic. Yet even 1,000 years ago the Islamic world was composed of people of quite different origins. Many of the thinkers who participated in the blossoming of science at that period were in fact Persians and not Arabs.