Biography Arab views on biography may be found in their historical and cosmographical compilations. The most remarkable is the book entitled Kitab al-Nabat composed by the historian al-Dinawari (Abu Hanifa Ahmad b. Daud). The book is lost but quotations from the book are found in Ibn Sina and Ibn al-Baitar. Gradually, Muslims acquired a taste for travel across the world for the sheer joy of acquiring new knowledge. With their passionate curiosity and their innate gift for observation, they were to prove excellent students, turning their attention to geography as well as to fauna and flora, to political and social institutions, to history and economics. The great respect in which the Arabs always held men of learning would often induce them to press on to distant lands in order to seek out scholars and if possible to sit at their feet as students.5
