In Contesting Cosmographies, Omar Walid Anchassi offers a panoramic survey of Islamic intellectual history through the lens of a single issue: how have Muslims understood the cosmos, and how has this changed over time? Exploring a vast range of sources in manuscript and print, Anchassi demonstrates that prior to the modern period, there were two major ways of understanding the created world among Muslims: one largely inspired by the Talmud (the traditionalist cosmography) and another derived mostly from the teachings of the ancient Greeks (the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmography). These rival traditions remained in conflict well into the modern period, before they were finally swept away by a third tradition, the Copernican, in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries.