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The earliest description of Europe (أروفى|urūfā, not أوروبا; from Εὐρώπη) in Arabic literature comes from a book called *Routes and Realms* by Ibn Khordāḏbeh (fl. 800s CE), by the caliph’s head of the postal and intelligence service; it's quite fascinating (translation below)
The text reads:
The inhabited world (الأرض المعمورة=οἰκουμένη) is divided into four regions. Among them is [1] EUROPE, which contains al-Andalus, [the lands of] the Slavs, Byzantium (al-rūm), Francia, and Tangiers until the border of Egypt; ...
The inhabited world (الأرض المعمورة=οἰκουμένη) is divided into four regions. Among them is [1] EUROPE, which contains al-Andalus, [the lands of] the Slavs, Byzantium (al-rūm), Francia, and Tangiers until the border of Egypt; ...
and [2] LIBYA, which contains Egypt, Clysma, Ḥabashah, and the upper Nile … ; and [3] ÆTHiOPIA, which contains Tihāmah, al-Yaman, the Sind, India, and the China; and [4] SCYTHIA, which contains Armenia, Khurāsān, the Turks and the Khazars. [end quote]
The quote gives an alternative view of "Europe" than one that prevails today and reveals how the Arabic tradition became an heir of the Greco-Roman geography, adopting its view of a single oikoumene, and helps us see its alternative lives outside Latin Christendom.
Interestingly, geographers writing in Arabic dispensed with the use of 'Europe' as a geographic designation, as far as we can tell, in the following century. For more info, I recommend: https://www.academia.edu/3894634/Arabic-Islamic_Historiographers_on_the_Emergence_of_Latin-Christian_Europe
Source of the Arabic text:
https://archive.org/details/almaslk-walmmalk/page/n153
https://archive.org/details/almaslk-walmmalk/page/n153
