Ibrāhīm al-Balīshṭār's book of arithmetic (ca. 1575): hybridizing Spanish mathematical treatises with the Arabic scientific tradition (Q2660398)

This is a highly interesting and very well researched article on an hitherto unknown Arabic treatise on arithmetic written around the year 1575 by the otherwise unknown scholar Ibrāhīm al-Balīshṭār in Cherchell, 90 km west of Algiers on the Mediterranean coast. Al-Balīshṭār was a Morisco, a Muslim who was forced to convert to Christianity and later to leave his native Aragon. In this article, he is shown to stem from the Muslim village of Barbués (just south of Huesca) on the basis of historical documents that list his grandfather and father. He most likely emigrated to Algeria around the year 1570. Al-Balīshṭār's hybrid treatise on arithmetic, combining Spanish sources with Arabic ones, is extant in five manuscripts (four kept in the National Library of Tunisia and one in Lybia), and is untitled and incomplete in each of these. The prologue states that the work was translated from `a book on the art of arithmetic composed by the priest Almān', i.e., the 1552 \textit{Arithmetica algebratica} by Marco Aurel, who was of German descent and was also called Aléman. The article shows that al-Balīshṭār also included problems from the well-known \textit{Tractado subtilissimo d'arismetica y de geometria} by Juan de Ortega, and that he explicitly mentioned the fourteenth-century Arabic authors Muḥammad b.\ Aḥmad al-Ghurbī\ and Sa`īd b.\ Muḥammad al-`Uqbānī. The summary of some interesting aspects of the contents of al-Balīshṭār's treatise in Section 6 of the article further whets the reader's appetite for the full edition and study announced by the authors.