The Muslims progressed well beyond their Greek predecessors in the use of plants for medicinal purposes & the Muslim list of drugs contained several hundreds of remedies unknown to the Greeks. Ibn Juljul, for instance, was conscious of the fact that medicine & botany had developed since the days of Dioscorides, & new items used for medication had come from the East, or were found in Al-Andalus. Muslims gave Arabic names to plants & medicines they came across for the first time, many such names are still used today.
In the work of Ibn al-Awwam six hundred plants possessing medicinal properties are enumerated; in that of Ibn Al-Baytar more than three hundred, hitherto unclassified or unknown, are mentioned & described.
Al-Dinawri the founder of Arabic botany - Ābu Hanīfah Āhmad ibn Dawūd Dīnawarī (828 – 896) studied agriculture, botany & metallurgy, geography, mathematics & history. He was born in Dinawar (in modern day Western Iran, halfway between Hamadan & Kermanshah). He studied astronomy, mathematics & mechanics in Isfahan & philology & poetry in Kufa & Basra. He died on July 24, 896 at Dinawar. His most renowned contribution is Book of Plants, for which he is considered the founder of Arabic botany.
Al-Dinawari is certainly one of the earliest Muslim botanists. His work, largely confined to the flora of Arabia [61], is perhaps the most comprehensive & methodical philological work on herbs. His treatise Kitab al-Nabat is characterised as “the most comprehensive & methodically most superior work of this philologically-orientated botany.” Al-Dinawari’s work was long considered lost, but thanks to the particular attention of the German scholar Silberberg, it was made known in a thesis from Breslau in 1908. The thesis contains the descriptions of about 400 plants from the book of al-Dinawari. However, what is described by Silberberg is just a part of what has survived, & there have been editions of different parts of the work by different authors. In particular, Lewin has collated parts of the alphabetical section from the Istanbul manuscript; whilst the sixth volume has been reconstructed by Muhammad Hamidullah from citations collected from large dictionaries & monographs & contains the descriptions of 637 plants.
Al-Dinawari’s information is based on older written sources, on oral information from Bedouins, and, occasionally, on personal observation. His book Kitab al-nabat consists of two sections, one being an alphabetical inventory of plant names (and thus the first alphabetically-ordered specialised dictionary), the second section contains monographs on plants used for specific practical purposes: kindling; dyeing; bow-making. There also is a very interesting chapter on mushrooms & similar plants (to the latter belong the parasitic broomrapes Balanophoraceae). This chapter (included in Lewin’s edition) gives important information on the gathering, use, & growth of a number of mushrooms. Al-Dinawari also devoted one chapter to the classification of plants (tajnis al-nabat) which he mentions in one of the volumes that have survived. ... In his exposition on the earth, Al-Dinawari describes a variety of soils, explaining which is good for planting, its properties & qualities, & also describes plant evolution from its birth to its death, including the phases of growth & production of flower & fruit. He then covers various crops, including cereals, vineyards & date palms. Relying on his predecessors, he also explains trees, mountains, plains, deserts, aromatic plants, woods, plants used as dyes, honey, bees, etc.
