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Copernicus, recent works in the history of science challenge this presumption. With the advantage of accumulated findings, Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of “astronomers associated with the observatory of Marāgha in northwestern Iran,” whose works, written in Arabic, “reached Europe, Italy in particular, in the fifteenth century through Byzantine Greek intermediaries.” They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: “In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the ‘Marāgha School.’ “The contemporary history of science shows similar re-thinkings in other fields, such as anatomy (the pulmonary circulation of blood) and mathematics (decimal fractions). The lacuna in the history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place ofAndalusia—Arabic-writing Spain—in the historical study of the Renaissance.
    We have seen that Eurocentric history constructed two peripheries: one visible, the other invisible. Part of the invisible periphery was Africa. The same political project that produced a self-standing history of the West also produced a self-standing history of Africa. Like the notion of “the West,” that of Africa was also turned into a racialized object. The difference was that Africa was debased rather than exalted, redefined as the land south of the Sahara, coterminous with that part of the continent ravaged during the slave trade. The scholars who questioned the racialized degradation of Africa at the same time further eroded the production of Eurocentric history.
    The reconsideration of African history began with the Senegalese savant, Cheikh Anta Diop, who wrote his major work, The African Origin of Civilization , in the 1960s. Diop questioned the racist tendency to dislocate the history of pharaonic Egypt—in which roughly one quarter of the African population of the time lived—from its surroundings, particularly Nubia to the south, thereby denying the African historical identity of ancient Egypt. Diop targeted the cherished heart of the Eurocentric tradition, the classics, which not only cast Greece and Rome as eternal components of “the West” but also stripped Egypt of its historical identity. In the study of classics, Egypt faced a double loss: its connection with Greece in ancient times was reduced to being external and incidental, and its location in Africa was denied historical significance.
    Diop’s work provided the foundation on which the British scholar Martin Bernal based his monumental two-volume work, Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Bernal showed the ways in which the main tradition of Egyptologyhad been shaped by a metanationalist Western way of thinking rooted in the nineteenth-century imperial, particularly, German, imagination. Bernal contrasted this imperial imagination with what Greeks had to say about themselves, particularly about their great historical and civilizational debt to pharaonic Egypt. In particular, he showed how the Greeks’ image of themselves as the product of an invasion from Egypt in the south was reversed in the European imperial imagination to portray classical Greece as the product of an Aryan invasion from the north. Bernal also made it clear that Greece, originally a colony of Egypt, was an amalgam of diverse influences, initially African, Phoenician, and Jewish, later northern European. If early classical Egypt is better thought of as an African civilization, classical Greece is better thought of as a Mediterranean—rather than European—civilization.
    Edward Said summed up “the principal dogmas of Orientalism” in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that portray “the West” as “rational, developed, humane [and] superior,” caricature “the Orient” as “aberrant,