“Checkered History” Recolored: The Changing Fortunes and Misfortunes of Optical Works in Islamic and European Lands “Checkered history”, an expression first coined with reference to the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham by A. I. Sabra whose own monumental work on the subject forms the basis of this paper, referred to the overlap of the book’s “undeserved misfortune” and “unexpected good luck” in Islamic and European lands respectively. These were to capture the sharp contrast in the transmission and use of an Arabic text hardly circulated internally, but groundbreaking externally through Latin and Italian versions and a printed edition. The present paper extends the expression “checkered history,” to the bright and dark sides of other key developments within optics in terms of both breakthroughs and discontinuities related to the transmission of, not only major works and their distinct paths within Islamic and European regions, but also, key concepts and terms, and other aspects of transmission. The concept of “checkered history” can been extended from the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham (d. after ca. 432/1040) to earlier optical works starting with Euclid (300 BC) and Ptolemy (2nd century) to trace the microscopic footpaths of all those works through maps on a multimedia platform. A recently discovered manuscript of an Ottoman catalogue, which lists among its entries, the Kitab al-Manazir of Ibn al-Haytham, as well as its commentary Tanqih al-Manazir by Kamal al-Din Farisi (d. ca. 1718/1318) and the slightly later composition of Farisi, Kitab al-Basa’ir, occasions further extensions to include later works representing between them a reversal of “checkered history.” This starts with the previously unknown availability of the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham in Islamic lands, and the apparent non-transmission to Europe of all the manuscripts of its seven books still in Istanbul, with yet further extensions of that “recoloring” to other understudied areas.