Abstract
<jats:p>The 10th-century mathematician Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Uqlīdisī, author of the earliest surviving Arabic treatise on Hindu arithmetic (Kitāb al-Fuṣūl fī al-Ḥisāb al-Hindī, composed Damascus, 952-53 CE), carries a nisba conventionally interpreted as "the Euclidean"-a tag supposedly denoting a copyist or seller of manuscripts of Euclid's Elements. This interpretation, first advanced by A.S. Saidan in the 1960s, has been accepted largely without challenge. This paper argues that a toponymic reading of the nisba-linking al-Uqlīdisī to the ancient city of Eqlīd )اقلید( in Fārs Province, Iran-deserves serious scholarly consideration. The argument rests on five pillars: (1) the complete absence of any Euclidean geometric content in al-Uqlīdisī's surviving work; (2) the exclusively Hindu-arithmetic character of his scholarship; (3) the existence of a real, ancient city whose name is phonetically proximate; (4) the deep historical connections between Fārs Province and Indian mathematical traditions; and (5) the fact that no biographical dictionary confirms or even mentions al-Uqlīdisī, rendering all interpretations of his nisba conjectural.</jats:p>