The talk aims at providing a personal account of current historiographical, methodological and theoretical issues of relevance for the history of science in Islamic societies. For that purpose I would like to present a self-reflexive and critical survey of the intellectual traditions which, in nineteenth-century Europe, have shaped the modern discipline of the history of science and determined the kinds of questions we ask, and the type of discourses we hold, with respect to non-Western scientific traditions, in particular those of Islam and India. The main concern will be not so much to recount stories of orientalist myths and prejudices, but to grasp to what extent the misconceptions, categories and agendas of previous generations of scholars may still permeate the minds of contemporary historians of science. In the final section of the talk I will attempt to assess the -- alas still too marginal -- place and status of "non-Western" and "pre-modern" science within our larger discipline today. I shall explain why the results of the past decades of scholarship on Islamic and Indian science, which have substantially changed our understanding and perspective, ought to be taken seriously by all historians of science. I will conclude the talk by formulating ideas about how the exchanges between specialists of remote subdisciplines might be improved.