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  Back in the 10th century, when the region was known as Transoxiana, Bukhara was the capital of the Persian Samanid Dynasty, under which culture and science flourished. It was during this Islamic Golden Age that the doctor Ibn Sina wrote a medical textbook so sophisticated that its Latin version was used in Europe until the 1700s, and the mathematician al-Khorezmi, whose name has since lent itself to the word “algorithm,” invented al-jabr, or “algebra.”

Photography by Theodore Kaye