New Perspectives on the History of Islamic Science

Volume 3

Muzaffar Iqbal, Muzaffar Iqbal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351914772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent studies in the history of Islamic science based on the discovery and study of new primary texts and instruments have substantially revised the views of nineteenth-century historians of science. This volume presents some of these ground-breaking studies as well as articles which shed new light on the ongoing academic debate surrounding the question of the decline of Islamic scientific tradition.

Part I
Theoretical Underpinnings

[1]
REFLECTIONS ON SOME NEW STUDIES ON APPLIED
SCIENCE IN ISLAMIC SOCIETIES (8^TH-19^TH CENTURIES)

David A. King

Recent research on Arabic scientific and legal manuscripts, as well as on astronomical instruments, has led to a new understanding of the different ways in which Muslim scholars over many centuries applied scientific methods to determine the times of prayer and the sacred direction (qiblah).

Keywords: New studies on the history of Islamic science; qiblah; times of prayer; World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca; The Call of the Muezzin; Instruments of Mass Calculation; The Sacred Geography of Islam; Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science Series.

Muzaffar Iqbal kindly invited me to pen a few thoughts for this journal as I see through press the third of four books dealing with aspects of applied science in Islamic civilization. I have been fortunate enough to work in manuscript libraries and museums all over the world for over 30 years, and these books are the main fruits of this enterprise. (Believe me, the frustrations of such activities and the attendant discomforts sometimes outweigh the pleasures.) The books, I would maintain, deal with topics of fundamental importance to the history of Islamic civilization, yet these topics have not been dealt with previously, because only a very few unrepresentative sources had been unearthed.

Both Muslim scientists and Muslim legal scholars addressed what I have called “science in the service of Islam”, that is:

1. (1) the regulation of the strictly lunar Muslim calendar;
2. (2) the organization of the times of prayer; and
3. (3) the determination of the sacred direction (qiblah) towards the Kaʿbah in Makkah.

These new books supplement my three volumes of Variorum reprints published a few years ago and dealing mainly, but not exclusively, with these same three topics. ¹ All of my studies clearly distinguish between:

1. (1) the scientific tradition pursued by the select few in Islamic societies,² and
2. (2) the folk scientific tradition (devoid of any mathematics beyond simple arithmetic and of any astronomy other than what can be observed with the naked eye) favored by the legal scholars of Islam.³

An appreciation of the dichotomy between the approaches of the scientists and the legal scholars is essential to an understanding of why scientific activity flourished for so long, but also eventually declined, in Islamic societies. This is never mentioned by anyone who has written on the nature of science in the Islamic world, let alone on its decline. It is also important for the notion of “Islam and Science” or “Science in Islam”, for when Muslim scientists, using mathematics, addressed problems provided by the tenets of Islam, they came up with completely different solutions from those proposed by the legal scholars, who used the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth, together with the simple procedures of folk science. For a modern example, consider the two schools of North American Muslims regarding the qiblah: one group maintains it is north of east in North America (based on geography and mathematics) and the other favor south of east (based on a naïve modern kind of folk geography).

In the sequel, I shall briefly describe the contents of each of the new books. I shall also discuss the problem that, because of the nature of the transmission of knowledge these days, this flurry of new books on practical aspects of Islamic ritual and scientific highlights of Islamic civilization will probably never reach a serious Muslim scholarly audience in the form that I am publishing them.

The first book, entitled World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca and published in 1999, examines the way in which Muslim scholars for over a millennium dealt with the determination of the qiblah.⁴ Here we witness the ingenuity of scientists from the 9^th to, say, the 15^th century, as they confronted a complicated problem of mathematical geography: their results are impressive by any standards. A large part of the book is devoted to a detailed study of two remarkable newly-discovered world-maps from Ṣafavid Iran (late 17^th century) fitted with a cartographical grid so devised that one can simply read the direction and distance to Makkah at the centre. In the book, I hypothesized that the brilliant idea underlying the grids on the maps must go back to earlier (9^th or 10^th century) Islamic sources, which alas I had been unable to locate (though see below). I had, however, investigated numerous Ṣafavid works, finding them all lacking the kind of initiative in evidence behind the map grids, and I also considered the possibility of influence from European sources, with negative conclusions. This book was published in the series Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies by Brill Academic Publishers, with a subvention from the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation that made it affordable. Muzaffar Iqbal reviewed the book and the underlying methodology favorably in the first issue of this journal,⁵ although he found me incapable of penetrating “the realm where the Islamic scientific tradition is perceived in its totality with all its integral links to the metaphysical doctrines of Islam intact”.

The second book, The Call of the Muezzin, is available from E. J. Brill as of January, 2004. It contains a comprehensive collection of essays devoted to astronomical timekeeping by the sun and stars and the determination of the times of Muslim prayer, as practiced in Islamic societies for over ten centuries.⁶ A large part of this book—written already in the 1970s—deals with tables for time-keeping by the sun and stars and for regulating the times of prayer; it is based on over 500 manuscripts that nobody had ever looked at previously in modern times. The materials come from all over the Islamic world from Fez to Yarqand and from Crete to Taiz. The book also contains sections on the origins of the definitions of the times of prayer that became standard (but which are not specifically mentioned either in the Qurʾān or the ḥadīth), on the simple methods for timekeeping that were used by the scholars of the sacred law, and on the activities and social status of the muezzins and muwaqqits. Since no sponsor could be found for this book, it will sell at four times the cost of the first.

In my first book, I had hypothesized the existence of an early Islamic tradition of Makkah-centred world-maps, of which the two Ṣafavid examples were the sole surviving evidence. In the second book, I present a third Ṣafavid map of the same kind. I also present evidence, discovered by my colleague Jan Hogendijk of Utrecht, that Muslim scientists in the 10^th century (Baghdad) and 11^th century (Isfahan) had discussed the solution of the qiblah problem using ellipses, such as are found (sensibly approximated by arcs of circles) on the Ṣafavid maps. This should quieten those ungenerous colleagues in the history of European astronomy and cartography who preferred to see European initiative behind the Ṣafavid world-maps.

The third book, entitled Instruments of Mass Calculation, deals with astronomical instruments from the Islamic world and is to appear with E. J. Brill later in 2004. ⁷ I coined this title because we searched for such instruments in Iraq, and indeed all over the Islamic world, and we found enough evidence to prove that Muslim astronomers had serious programs of instrumentation from the 8^th to the 19^th century. My book is my contribution to the “war against ignorance”. It reveals for the first time the range and sophistication of the long and rich tradition of Islamic astronomical instrumentation. It was already well known that medieval European instrumentation was highly indebted to the Islamic tradition, but now it is clear that only after ca. 1550 did European instrument-makers make technical innovations that had not been known to Muslim astronomers previously. This comes as quite a surpnse to colleagues who work on Renaissance European instruments.⁸ My book includes an essay on the earliest known astrolabe, from 8^th-century Baghdad, which at least until the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was housed in the Archaeological Museum in Baghdad. (I have no idea where it is now.) It continues with a description of all known astrolabes from late-9^th- and 10^th-century Baghdad, some 13 in number, taken from my unpublished catalogue of medieval Islamic and European instruments. I also include an essay showing that the idea behind the most sophisticated instrument of the Renaissance, the universal horary dial for finding time by the sun for any latitude, is most probably of early Islamic origin. Although I did not find precisely this instrument mentioned in Arabic texts, I did locate some years ago a treatise on a more complex instrument for the more difficult problem of timekeeping by the stars from 9^th-century Baghdad.⁹ Certain colleagues in the history of European astronomy have accused me of indulging in a kind of cultural contest, and I have to admit to a certain amount of pleasure in ...