Astronomy in the Service of Islam

[Music] [Applause] [Music] salamualikum' good evening ladies and gentlemen respected guests it's a great pleasure to have you all here tonight I'm delighted to welcome you in tonight's lecture with in the series of London lectures that's how we call them organized by the proton Center for the Study of the Islamic manuscripts at al-tofah before I give the floor to the keynote speaker tonight as you know with us tonight is Professor David King which we are honored to have him among us a I'm delighted to invite first mrs. Sarah Imani she's a member of the YCC T we call it the yamani cultural and charitable trust is an overseeing body I would like to invite her to say a few words and to welcome you on behalf of the the trust and its chairman His Excellency Sheikh Zakia my alaikum good evening respected guests ladies and gentlemen I am delighted to welcome you all on behalf of my father the chairman of Quran His Excellency Sheikh Ahmed Aki Imani and on behalf of the trustees of the Y C city yamani cultural and charitable foundation trust sorry a body that oversees the work of at work on it is great pleasure to see you all here tonight and I'm honored to welcome you all this lecture is part of African public lectures which aim to strengthen links with those who are interested in the Islamic heritage and to raise awareness about the richness of this shared heritage beside many conferences symposia and training courses over the last three decades as for client has organized more than 60 lectures on different aspects of Islamic heritage culture and civilization such as codicology paleography critical Edition bibliography history history of science arts architecture etc tonight's lecture will tackle a topic which is considered a cornerstone in the field of Islamic heritage tradition and studies namely the field of astronomy Muslim scholars throughout the Islamic era devoted considerable energy to many aspects of astronomy including the aspects related to religious practice such as the lunar calendar the Qibla and the Salah I cannot think of a better person to speak about this topic than Professor David King a world-renowned authority in this field who is also an old friend of Alpha pond and we are honored to have him with us here tonight and I would like to thank him for all the his contributions and continuous support to our foundations projects and activities this lecture promises to be very informative and enlightening and I thank you all for joining us this evening and look forward to welcoming you again to future events thank you thank you Sarah yeah indeed to tonight's lecture promises to be a very informative and very enlightening professor David King through this lecture entitled astronomy in the service of Islam will take us into a long scientific journey it will take us to the main milestones that characterized the studies in this field which is the field of astronomy during they stomach here obviously the most important findings in this field during this era and the impact and the influence that such findings had in the advancement of the science in this field later on before I give the floor and we start with the lecture I would like to say a few words about professor David King David King is a british-born Orientalist who has spent his academic life researching the history of Islamic astronomy both Falk astronomy and mathematical astronomy he first studied mathematics at Cambridge University then education at Oxford University and worked with the Sudanese Ministry of Education then as he likes to put it he went medieval and studied Near Eastern languages and literatures at eel University his research is based mainly on medieval Arabic manuscripts and instruments he spent 20 years in the UK ten years in the Near East 10-year in the United States and close to 40 years in Germany and France he was project director at the American Research Center in Egypt professor professor of Near Eastern languages and literature's at New York University and he is now emeritus professor of history of science at the frankfurt yawn Volvic Volta Gong great a university in in Frankfurt his numerous publications include five varioram volumes Islamic mathematical astronomy Islamic astronomer astronomical instruments astronomy in the service of Islam medieval Islamic astronomy and geography and astrolabes from medieval Europe his major works are work maps for finding the directions to Mecca published in 1999 in part published by Otto Kahn supported as a project which we have been delighted and in synchrony with the heavens astronomical timekeeping an instrumentation in Islamic civilization published in 2004-2005 his publications can be downloaded at an online platform named David a king dot academia.edu I'm honoured and delighted to invite professor King to address this distinguished audience tonight so please professor join me in that good evening ladies and gentlemen can you hear me at the back are you sitting comfortably I asked Sally not to exaggerate and I am under constraints this evening I have my wife here who told me not to talk too much about astronomical tables and I have a former student former colleague from Frankfurt okay I come on now at Oxford Museum of history of science who has told me not to be nasty about various colleagues some of whom I mentioned last time I was here a year ago I'll try not to mention them this time it's also a pleasure to have part of the family here but I can't the average okay [Music] my story starts begins in Arabia where even in pre-islamic times the Arabs were concerned with a simple but comprehensive folk astronomy based on what one can actually see in the sky but then in the early 7th century there appeared the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran with its injunctions relating some of the pillars of the new religion of Islam to astronomical phenomena the Muslim world grew from small communities in Arabia until after just a few decades it looked like this particularly the contacts with the Byzantine world the Iranian world and the Indian world were fruitful for the recovery of scientific traditions that very soon became a truly Islamic scientific tradition with Arabic as the language of science and it should not be forgotten that the Arabs themselves had had their own tradition of folk astronomy in all of the major centers of Muslim civilization the study of astronomy flourished indeed it was the queen of the sciences practiced by the Muslims and our task as historians of Islamic astronomy is to piece together the different chapters in that history from the available sources which are mainly manuscripts and instruments such as you see here in the observatory at Istanbul these sources are now scattered in libraries and museums around the world one of those manuscripts from the Istanbul observatory one of these [Music] from the library private library of the director TECA Dean is particularly close to my heart because it formed the subject of my doctoral dissertation almost fifty years ago a manuscript from Leiden investigations help to bring the works of the Muslim astronomers back to life this fanciful Ottoman miniature from the top cover of the greatest muslim astronomer the 10th century egyptian of newness i say is the greatest because I wrote on him but he was the greatest presenting the Fatimid caliph al Hakim with a copy of his monumental work the Hakka message as each is an astronomical handbook full of tables and astronomical and explanatory text and ibin Eunice siege was actually several times larger than the book that you can see here the Calif does not look too happy but he should have been you will hear much talk about the zija's of off-hours me and al batani everybody hears about them but there are only two out of over two hundred zija's compiled by muslim astronomers between the eighth and the ninth 19th century i will not talk about jesus tonight because my wife will not want to hear that i will talk about tables for other purposes one of our colleagues in beirut who used to call what we did my teacher ted kennedy and myself diging about astronomy developed on two completely different levels in Islamic society the astronomers worked with instruments and observations and calculations but they were also the Muslim legal scholars or Faja Sunni and Shiah who worked only on what we call focused Romani that which we see in the heavens with the naked eye in modern Arabic a phallic attack lady they also favored a sacred cosmology a hater a Sania based on the Quran and the hadith inevitably what they propose these papa ha was on practical matters was different from what the astronomers proposed much of the written tradition of astronomy bill began in Baghdad madinat assalam which in the ninth and tenth centuries was the most civilized city on earth it was I have an Iraqi friend here in the front it was a city of learning and a books the 10th century bibliography Eden and Adam compiled a list of all the books known to him in Baghdad or in the Baghdad of his time many of those books are lost for all time but at least we have their titles even a Nadeem treated aspects of all aspects of contemporaneous astronomer scholarship including of course astronomy and mathematics and here are some of those books [Music] they covered the entire spectrum of Muslim learning and these books in Baghdad are here pictured in a manuscript of the mahkumat of al-hariri even in a deem unlike some modern scholars was also interested in makers of scientific instruments and he listed 30 astrolabe ists known to him in Baghdad unfortunately some of their instruments have been preserved and this one showed up in Sotheby's in London no 10 years ago and was published immediately and it was made in madinat as-salaam talk more about this later of the vast corpus of Islamic manuscripts relating to science and focus science we are going to concentrate on those dealing with three subjects the organization of the lunar calendar and religious festivals the determination of the sacred direction towards the Kaaba in Mecca the table and the orientation of mosques and the regulation of the five daily prayers whose times are astronomically defined I call this small but very important chapter in the history of Islamic science astronomy in the service of Islam people don't like it historians of Western science are not interested to know what the Muslims did for themselves curious Muslims are not interested either you can write what you like about these traditions of what they did in the Middle Ages but there's been no reaction whatsoever from the Muslim world on this [Music] some people don't like non-muslims working on this material but nobody else works on it so I'm was happy to do this we begin with the regulation of the lunar calendar here is the miniature of the astronomer takea Dean observing a comet on the first night of Ramadan see the new moon is the first night of Ramadan in the earth 1577 the legal scholars in general were happy to rely on witnesses who actually saw the Crescent on the first day of the month of the civil calendar in medieval times this procedure worked better than it sometimes does nowadays for the medieval astronomers on the other hand the determination of the possibility of sighting the lunar Crescent was a complicated problem and here the Sun is setting over the western horizon and the moon is going to set a few minutes later the question is whether the elongation between the Sun and the moon is sufficient the the Crescent be large enough that it be seen and that also depends on the time between sunset and moon set which is measured on the celestial equator the max in Arabic the delay between the two settings and of course also how high the moon is in the sky all very complicated but if these conditions were satisfied the conditions that they formulated involving the apparent distance between the Sun and Moon the difference in setting times and the altitude of the Moon above the horizon if they were satisfied then the Crescent would be seen if not then it would not be seen here is the earliest-known table for lunar Crescent visibility it was compiled by Al Horace me who is famous because he wrote a book on algebra so he's the greatest early Muslim mathematician but that's not so the book that he wrote on algebra was one of several algebra was known to the Babylonians and what is important about charisma aces astronomy especially works that were discovered in the 80s and 90s in various libraries including in Central Asia this one tells you all you need to know about rocket Ella Hiller each month of the year or each zodiacal sign there is a number here degrees and minutes if the elongation of the Sun and Moon is that amount or more the Crescent will be seen if it is less than that it will not be seen now these by the way are the numbers that you find in every astronomical table and the Arabic sources the abjad ABCD numbers that were used before Islam by the Greeks the Hebrews and during the Islamic period and later in medieval Europe but today in modern Europe we have forgotten about 16 as a number and about representing numbers by letters I've mentioned another name of Horus me to show that he didn't come from Central Asia he came from look for move you know where that is [Music] yeah just outside Baghdad and he was born there otherwise he wouldn't be called out what's troubling many people say he came from horrid in this Egyptian table for 1229 you're getting used to tables now for 12 for 1129 Hydra and it's one of a series for each hid ria calculations have been made for the first day of each month of the civil calendar a two civil can the two islamic calendar civil one and there's a religious one and if the moon is not seen on the first night of the month then it'll be seen on the next night what you have here is for this particular year 12 29 you have for each Muslim month you have the the latitude of the Moon the Polson nor is the distance between the Sun and the moon and important too is the delay between moon set and between sunset and run set the max and then you have a prediction at the end of every line it will be seen a Taliban well generally it will be seen or allow your a burden it will not be seen at all so you have to wait till the next day to begin the month of the religious month or a Sara Raya it will be difficult to see and we have several years of this table to see how they did it in the late summer sling period in brief the achievements of the astronomers in this domain were impressive indeed by the way they there was an article in that book there the Encyclopaedia of Islam Rosella all this is there and some of the subjects treated here are already in the encyclopedia our second topic concerns the sacred directional table towards the sacred Kaaba in Mecca and here we look first at what the astronomers did and then at what the I did because that's the way I did it I came to the Islamic methods of calculating the qibla and later when I realized there was a problem I went to the legal sources and found something else so the object of the exercise for the astronomers was to find the for any locality X to find the peddler the direction from the local Meridian north/south line to Mecca and to do that properly you need to know your own latitude the latitude of Mecca and the longitude difference between and you can also calculate the distance to Mecca using the same formula but here look at the formula these are not for softies these serious trigonometric formulae which were solved already in the 9th century by Muslim scholars mainly in Baghdad but there are many solutions and there many variations and there was enough of a problem to keep Muslim astronomers going for a thousand years it's not trivial we have from Baghdad 825 a solution by solid geometry which blows the mind because this is only 200 years after the death of the property and they are dealing with solid geometry of which there was no previous tradition of this kind and there is a modern interpretation the same problem and this is too complicated for normal people and so Alcaraz me god bless him he made a table of qibla values in degrees in minutes for each degree of long longitude difference from Mecca and each degree of latitude difference from Mecca and that's the Qibla in degrees and minutes not bad for the ninth century [Music] but the ultimate solution or what sorry one of the ultimate solutions to the Kibler problem is a table and you're not getting tired of tables yet table by the 14th century Damascus astronomer shamsid-deen el khalili discovered 50 years ago in a Paris manuscript and other manuscripts are available particularly in Damascus and Cairo but in the table shows the Qibla in degrees and minutes for each degree of latitude 28 29 30 31 32 [Music] for each degree of longitude difference from the meridian of Mecca to the east and to the west and so what are written here actually longitudes to the east and to the west these values are so accurate that we have been unable to determine how al-khalili computed we had in Frankfurt a few years ago a man who is the expert on medieval tables Glenn fan bro Merlin of Canada and he spent a lot of time on elitist tables without being able to crack them the way you crack them is not by looking at the actual values you don't look at those you look at the errors and see how is it possible to reproduce these error patterns and I couldn't do it and here under and so it's still open [Music] another ultimate practical solution was the geographical table compiled in Kish near summer fund in the mid 15th century this gives the longitudes and latitudes longitude and latitude and peddler called here in Harris and her after the Meridian and also the distance to Mecca for 250 localities from al-andalus to China together with their qibla directions and distances to Mecca stable was discovered in an 18th century manuscript copied in Karbala preserved down the road in the British Library this kind of information who was often engraved on later instruments some astrologers actually early 10th 11th century where you have the Crippler forest on shown on the back of an astrolabe made in Isfahan and then these later suffered Kibler indicators and an astrolabe in the British Museum where the Qibla z' and the directions to Mecca are all written out in words [Music] quite a lot of reading No the we come now to the way the Kibler problem was solved by scholars who saw no need to actually calculate the qibla they knew very well that the rectangular base of the Kaaba is actually aligned in certain significant astronomical directions basically you could say the four corners are in the cardinal directions north south east west but that's not quite correct they the Kaaba is the this is the Canopus was a South indicator for the pre-islamic Arabs South in the sense they knew where South was but they also liked the direction of the raising of Canopus the brightest star in the southern heavens and lo and behold that defines the major axis of the Kaaba which is a rectangular base not squares the it happens for the latitude of Mecca that these two directions the major axis and the Minor that are perpendicular summer sunrise winter sunset down here and then also from Islamic pre-islamic meteorological folklore also linked the four winds with the sides of the Kaaba I like this one in particular the east wind was still called a bull that's a very interesting fact and this was discovered in the 80s and what was discovered in medieval Arabic texts was confirmed by satellite images now in these same legal texts or folk astronomical texts or basic geographical text we find schemes like this it's also encyclopedias we find pictorial schemes linking the sectors of the world defines a sector with the sides of with part of the perimeter of the karwa we have 20 different schemes and these are 212 sector schemes and 70 to 60 [Music] these schemes also tell you which direction to face which astronomical direction to face to face the cube root of the Kaaba see the but the astronomers were saying you face Mecca calculate the direction of Mecca the legal scholars were saying no no no not interested in the city of Mecca we're interested in the Kaaba this is what's said in the Quran we want to face the site of a building that you cannot see so where is this Kaaba well it helps to know what the Kaaba actually looks like and represents and that helps you when you're in Angeles or in China to choose the appropriate astronomical direction historians of Islamic architecture have wondered for a long time about the often curious orientations of medieval Islamic Islamic religious architecture some of them have wondered why some medieval mosques do not face the modern Qibla directions these colleagues are beyond hope because you cannot expect a medieval mosque to face Mecca in the way you would build a new mosque today we are getting closer with other people who recognize that these mosques are not always in the qibla that was calculated by the medieval astronomers there were other considerations such as mosque being built on the foundations of earlier religious architecture in Jerusalem in Damascus in Cordoba for a start but others were laid out in directions defined by astronomical horizon Fela phenomenon the Sun goes up there in midwinter or goes up there in midsummer this will do for the Qibla because the Kaaba is the way it is that's what happened these are three cities on which we have textual for which we have textual evidence and which present some problems and need to be compared with existing mosques the situation is so complicated that some modern writings on orientations are not to be believed I'm gonna be nasty again such as the book showing that the earliest mots fate petra and not Mecca as I said not to be believed this is all nonsense these mosques all face Mecca every single one of them faces Mecca whether they're facing south or east or left they were built to face the Qibla and only rarely did this difference between the qibla directions proposed by the legal scholars and those proposed by the scientists lead to conflict some legal scholars accepted for the qibla either the actual direction of the Kaaba is the Kaaba and here's the direction from the the person who's standing looking at the Kaaba you should face this directly but it's also legally acceptable for you to stand there facing the Kaabah but anywhere in between 90 degrees is acceptable according to this particular manuscript from Oxford rarely did it happen that a mosque had to be pulled down and rebuilt in a different direction one very good example from war sitting in Iraq was aligned to first towards winter sunset and that was pulled down and a new mosque was oriented in the direction computed by the Austral astronomers in the 9th century the third aspect of astronomy in the service of Islam relates to the times of the five daily prayers these are defined by the position of the Sun above or below the horizon everybody knows that Muslims pray five times a day but how did they do this in the medieval period and why are these prayers astronomically defined particularly the daylight prayers in terms of shadows here we can differentiate between simple procedures for all and highly sophisticated procedures in some of the principal scientific centers the islamic day begins at sunset of the mother of prayer because the calendar is based on the visibility of the moon at sunset second prayer is the usher at nightfall the third is the fudge daybreak the fourth is the zora at midday and the time of the fifth prayer the Auslan is regulated by means of shadows the shadow of a vertical Norman Matthias is minimum at midday there's the normal and there's the minimum shadow at midday the officer begins when the increase in the length of the shadow is equal to the length of the Norma and ends in some circles when the shadow let increase has become twice living for the Nama in mockery and under Lucie practice the shadow reserved for begins when the shadow increases 1/4 of the length of the Norman we may well ask why the Muslim can use simple shadow observations by day here's an omen in the mosque of djenne of jihad in the Yemen and here is a simple set of shadow lengths midday shadows of a person for each month of the to regulate the zora and to start to regulate the awesome I just hope that this Norman is still there and I just hope if this mosque is still there and I just hope that Janet is still there the Malaysian could also use simple arithmetic or procedures using them lunar mansions the Manasa de comer but already in the ninth century the astronomers introduced mathematical solutions and the earliest known table for regulating the terms of the Zohar and the other is of course from early 9th century Baghdad and it's our friend Horace me who prepared a table for the latitude of 33 degrees which is Baghdad giving in these titles here giving the name of the Sirdar cosinus for each 30 days the beginning of the Tsar the beginning of the US the end of the US and that's the argument this is a very nice table the first of its kind and here's an extract from the tables from the prayer time for the prayer times of the latitude of Cairo prepared by my friend of newness around 1,000 you know those tables you those little tables used to find on the wall and Muslim houses and places giving the press for each day they were the modern solution to this problem this is the medieval solution this is much more impressive because it was done by hand and I I rather like these tables I hope you can stand one or two more tables to us my wife anymore destroys from me okay we're getting to the end of this particularly in Egypt but also in the 13th century and Syria in the 14th the office of mosque astronomer or moppet flourished this is an extract from a Paris manuscript of the splendid set of tables by my friend shamsid-deen afarid and work it at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus for each day of the earth each degree of Capricorn here he tabulated all these functions these are all complicated trigonometric functions and what does he got here he's got the operations of the times of day and night for the latitude of 33 degrees 30 minutes Yanni Damascus and he's got four Capricorn he's got the maximum altitude of the Sun half the length of daylight the hours of daylight the altitude of the Sun at the awesome the time of the officer and he's got the length of night and the duration of morning Twilight here and evening Twilight and more besides all correctly computed to the nearest four minutes now my wife is getting anxious almost there Muslim astronomers were not only interested in the times of Prayer they compared tables for finding the time of day by the Sun and the time of night by the Stars and here's an extract from a tenth century table again preserved in Paris for finding the time of day by the Sun computed for the latitude of Baghdad 10th century you feed in the maximum altitude of the Sun and you feed in the instantaneous altitude of the Sun and you get the time we have numerous tables of this kind for different cities throughout the Muslim world Muslim astronomers contributed to astronomical timekeeping I recently published a description of the tables used in medieval Jerusalem published by Muslim heritage and I thought the time was ripe as a gentle reminder that Jerusalem was a Muslim Arab city in the Middle Ages up to 20 cent a fact that some people seem to have forgotten there are two people I wanted to dedicate this to this this to one cannot read you cannot think and so will forget the Donald and Netanyahu I would like to dedicate it to him but he'll be in prison and so it would be a waste so I put it on the stand heritage thanks to the boss what have we got here the tables date from the 14th century and contain twenty thousand entries that means to book like that therefore finding the time from the altitude of the Sun throughout the year and regulating the times of the five daily prayers before the discovery of these tables it was not known that there was ever any serious astronomical activity in Jerusalem what the manuscript here is from Leipzig second different parts of the same corpus from Princeton and one manuscript from Cairo and today I was talking with Celeste the librarian here about the possibility of some of the things that they're in the whole idea catalog that I cannot access when I have the catalog whether it's possible to get some photos maybe there's even more there I would hope that we might find a couple more copies the main thing is we have one copy of each of the three parts of this corpus so Muslim astronomers contributed to astronomical timekeeping for close to a thousand years and I have tried to document their achievements for the first time this book in synchrony with the heavens the title sort of summarizes Islamic astronomy that's what it was about it includes surveys and analysis of all sorts of tables for timekeeping based on over 500 manuscripts I gave it the title subtitled the call of the Mosin and there are 700 pages of text dealing with Islamic tables that really is too much but I had to do it some people say they don't like tables and they say if you've seen one you've seen them all this is very short-sighted as far as I know the book has had little influence and so I've recently put the whole book on the web on my website so anybody can download it for free a colleague of mine recently published a book on perceptions of time in the Islamic world she thoughtfully included a reference to my survey my survey of one millennium of activity by Muslim astronomers and legal scholars in astronomical timekeeping using tables and instruments her discussion was packed into one half of one sentence blew my mind I've tried to give an introduction to what Muslim astronomers did in the way of astronomy is one small chapter in Islamic astronomy there's so much more but this is all we'll discuss today or is it in brief they produce all manner of tables and all manner of instruments mainly for astronomical time period their achievements were considerable and now that they are documented for the first time the history the history of Islamic astronomy looks very much richer thank you [Applause] [Music] as in the campaign against obesity the British government is trying to for bid people like Tesco to offer two for the price of one because it makes you fat I read that this morning and now I can stop and go away but it so happens that I never talk about transmission because there are so many people who talk about transmission of Islamic material to medieval Europe and of course most people love the Greeks more than anybody else Oh Greek science in Islam into Europe they love it so if you will permit me I could speak for another 20 minutes on the European Renaissance and see if there was any Muslim influence there am I allowed to do that yeah so yeah the end is not really the end and here is a new beginning and until the 1970s scholars tended to be interested only in Islamic scientific or scientific material that was transmitted to medieval Europe now I too am interested in European astronomy in the Medieval and Renaissance periods and I should like to show you a couple of dozen examples from the European Renaissance Venise on side by side with instruments earlier Islamic instruments of the same kind I do this to annoy some colleagues but I do this to edify you one of the conclusions you can draw is that maybe the Muslim contribution to astronomy is perhaps still a little underestimated [Music] this is a new subject the only other person who's talked about anything similar was standing right here a few years ago George saliba my academic twin has published a book about Islamic influence in the Renaissance but he was only talking about planetary astronomy he never talks about anything and I only talk about instruments and prayer times so I thought instruments Renaissance what do we mean by Renaissance whose Renaissance there's a move afoot in the intellectual world to talk about Rene sauces involving other people were there any other what are we mean by the European Renaissance I like to define it as a sort of wake-up call mmm Europe woke up out of the middle ages and discovered that there was more and they were a bit late but they discovered they rediscovered the Greek texts which had already been translated into Arabic but they when they prefer to translate the stuff from so I'm gonna get blasted later by MIDI used did you know there was a Renaissance in Islamic civilization a hundred years ago the Swiss historian of Islamic civilization Adam it's published his famous book the Renaissance of Islam focusing on the 10th century and then you have King publishing on the internet on the occasion of the invasion of Iraq [Music] forces writing the Renaissance of astronomy in Baghdad in the 9th and 10th centuries it wasn't an essay it was just a short essay and then a long bibliography and then you have my friend George Saliba writing the making of the European Renaissance is in this picture was printed in Germany in 1533 this is a Renaissance taking place and these astronomers some of their instruments are Islamic in origin they didn't know that others are purely they didn't always know that others are purely European in conception most of them do not go back to the Greeks they go back to the Muslims we can understand the Renaissance achievements better if we know what our friends the Muslim astronomers themselves achieved please pretend that this miniature depicts them in Baghdad in the 9th century Isfahan in the 10th century Cairo in the 11th century Kaurava in the 12th century Murata in the 13th century Damascus in the 14th century Samarkand in the 15th century these were the capitals of astronomy in the Muslim world in those centuries it is now common knowledge that the solar lunar and planetary models of Copernicus were not original to Bernanke's but were somehow derived from Muslim sources they don't look the same but they are the same his models for the Sun Moon and planets are identical with mathematically identical with those of his predecessor or 150 years the 14th century Damascus astronomer even a Chartres Kapernick has made one big mistake describing a model for mercury that he obviously did not understand and the reason he didn't understand it is that it wasn't his model that was a big breakthrough when that was discovered much has been written on this situation and its consequences mostly by George saliba and I will not dwell on planetary theory either today of course Copernicus's proposal of a heliocentric planetary system was of more lasting significance few people are aware today that there were Muslims Muslim astronomers who proposed heliocentric before Copernicus but their works were not printed and that's the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance I shall deal with spherical astronomy the study of the apparent daily rotation of the sky around the observer the observer is in the middle you can't see him but everything goes around this way the Sun rises here goes up there and then the other side this is the Meridian the north-south line north-south on the other side at the horizon but the celestial pole around which everything revolves and lets measures the latitude of the locality if you know that the Sun goes up in the morning and sits in the evening you know something about spherical astronomy but nobody cares about spherical astronomy anymore that could be the subject of another lecture and I met an American in Istanbul two weeks ago who was crying that hysterical astronomy had been dropped from German school textbooks at the beginning of the 20th century and that now nobody knows anything about this simple situation [Music] so yeah I gave a lecture in the observatory and Tenerife a twenty years ago to some doctoral students in astrophysics I was asked to speak about Muslim things and tables and so on and I mentioned latitude and I got some funny looks and I asked how would you measure the latitude of Tenerife and not one out of 20 students doctoral students had any idea how you would measure this is the new order now what do we have here whoops we have more tables but only two or three tables look at these tables these are now were innocent world post-renaissance tables it's the early modern period 1791 the book which is about this thick the author for German astronomer and theologian mullah complained that he had great difficulty in finding a printer for this book which is about this thick [Music] now look at well in fact the way he made some money was to change the front page [Music] from German to French because the same tables that would work for the whole of Germany would also work for the whole of France so he doubled his income just like that but look at these terraces I'm almost finished with tables these tables are for finding the time up from the altitudes of the Sun or from the altitude of any star now that's mind boggling and our minds were boggling when we found one half of these tables that big in Cairo and the other half in Oxford and I think that that well the surviving copy to unravel scripts together is probably in the hand of the author and probably he nobody could be found to make any further copies there are half a million entries in these tables but they're better than the ones of Miller or Germany and France [Music] now [Music] you all know about the astrolabe if you don't there's a very nasty article on my academia page entitled what is an astrolabe that's actually the nice part the bad part is what is an astrolabe not the second part contains a whole lot of quotes from the Internet's you have never read such rubbish put out by professors students theologians the works nobody has a clue what this instrument is it's a model of the universe that you can hold in your hand there's the universe the Stars and the Sun are right there on this this grid here and they rotate over a series of plates which serve individual latitudes now these latitudes here are very flat and most astrolabes don't look like that but this astrolabe was made in the Yemen by a sultan and the latitudes are 13 degrees Hayden times an hour and they all fit inside a very nice little mother and it's called and you can you can set the configuration of the sky to the configuration of your horizon and your meridian just like that seconds and then you have a model of the universe and you can do an awful lot with it I tried to make a survey of these all the various and Islamic instruments [Music] well second volume of this book in synchrony with the heavens and since it was published in 2005 we gave it a silly title instruments of mass calculation but we were dealing with others who were lying about instruments of mass destruction and yeah look at this French astrolabe it's got two little dogs on look at this here those two Pussycats this is France 1350 this is Baghdad 985 there's some influence here if these are not the best examples I could have chosen but we have nice pictures and so we can say that for example these here are developed from the mihrabs which are common on Andalusia astrolabes from the 10th and 11th century and we can say that these birds here are inspired by a tradition of zoomorphic as star pointers that we find already in Baghdad and there's a little circle here and that circle is related to that cutter oil on this the Iraqi astrolabe actually a Byzantine simple but it appears on early Islamic astralis not many but some and I find this rather in prison for the art historians here these cats Wildcats big cats probably I think sasanian an inspiration we don't you don't have to stand up and this Katra foil is Byzantine surely the early Muslims like to katryca they put it for example on the walls of the palace of Masato and then we have here smiley and professor Hasani who is the author of editor author of 1001 inventions missed out this one you should put in this is the first smiley this is actually a representation of a lunar mansion a beloved from the mansion that was right here in between these two stars and this is a very unusual early Islamic representation it would be more reasonable just find a me Rabia but they appear only on the Andalusian yesterday and anybody who doesn't believe me that this feature went into the Italian Renaissance then there you have it in exactly the same position exactly the same function namely decorative nothing religious just decorative now 30 odd miles west of here in Redding there was a man called what was his name I should have written it down the African blog Rev John blogger who devised an instrument called the mathematical jewel it's a universal as related with this star map here and this construction of astral Abuk curves you can solve all the problems with the nested ape that you can do with the natural look with one plate rather than series it what bloggers I surely didn't know was that this was first devised in the 12th 13th century in Andaluz but at the same time there was a man and I'm sorry I left out his name even a Suraj who made this universal astrolabe which is the most sophisticated astrolabe that was ever made anywhere not least because it is universal you can see it has the same basic shape there but it's got 12 plates inside the devised in such a way that they can be used with the replay star map in five different ways for any latitude there's some owners marks on the rim of this showing that it went to Cairo in the 14th century still already and some astronomers said I own this I own this I own this and one of the astronomers a man called dr. zeizel huafei he said a brother Siraj made this very nice astrolabe but he didn't write a treatise on how to use it and so he wrote the treatise he was a very competent astronomer and he understood every single aspect of this astrolabe and I'm afraid we haven't published it yet but with my colleague Francois Shah had formerly a frankfurt we hope to publish this astrolabe and the texts one from Cairo which I found first which only talks about the front and the back and then I went to Oxford one day and I found in the drawer of photos and I found pictures of 12 plates and the instrument doesn't need any plates so what's going on here and the answer is it was made portable in mind if not very practical but now you get serious astronomical developments here where German Tanis was the greatest astronomer in Europe in the middle of the 15th century and I got blasted by that about that by a French colleague who thought that Paris was still the center of astronomy in Europe and in Paris with the beginning of the century and Vienna in the middle but don't forget Samarkand and this plate that was found in an astrolabe of regiomontanus type in New York is identical to a universal plate that is devised by Ivan Basso and Granada 1300 for solving problems for all latitudes inside an asteroid and then asteroids with Luna solar with lunisolar gear mechanism this one is in Greenwich and this one stumble I think it's Baroni writing in the 11th century on the same thing this was not a Muslim invention we had Greek instruments of the same kind that were transmitted to Islam and have not yet been properly published I love the quadrant named quadrant Rita's old cotton this was the second most common instrument in medieval Europe and it's obviously most a European invention it appears in the 12th century hands in al-andalus and amongst Christian community and in 14th century it was very popular it has these markings which are a universal approximate way of finding time it has a shadow scale and it has a movable curser imagiro which you can move to adjust the lassitude of the place and the time T at the time of the year the solar longitude now wouldn't you know in the Cairo manuscript Baghdad ninth century mention of the operations with the quarter of a circle anonymous could be also ASMI could be somebody else the latitude 33 is mentioned at the end and 33 is nothing but fact and it says that the circumference of the quadrant is divided into ninety degrees and there is a thing called a majora and on some of the quadrants this is muta Haruka and on some of them it is Tabata some move some don't and also the curves that you saw on the quadrants waitress are not the only way of representing time and so we have three different varieties of quadrant and two different for a varieties of cursor fixed or movable six examples of the quadrant described already in ninth century back there so why didn't the Muslims use this for centuries and the answer is they didn't like it because it doesn't work exactly it works only approximately the Muslims preferred instruments like this this one for Nishapur war but we have it already in texts in the ninth century back then and this one for Vienna these are the same instruments and the these were this is the quadrant Vito's this is all you need you don't need the stupid cursor on the outside it's not necessary this is all you need and that's all you find on these 10th century Baghdad master later and then these are the RA Quadrant for latitude 33 and these are trigonometric grids of two different types and all these shadow scales that you find on every astrolabe for the rest of I'm a million another thing which professor Hasani has not put in his book is the fact that the Muslim astronomers had cockpit in the 10 Center and this is not a 10th century example but I have one there is a Zija suffice preserved in Berlin as each mrs. eg with plates and that is an instrument astrolabe with plates inside would give astronomical siege information about planets and on some of the plates there are these marks to 10th century so graph paper please add it to list I found this one about a week ago I couldn't believe well this one was Sotheby's ten years ago an instrument with the representation of serious trigonometric functions by the leading instrument maker of Baghdad with a solar scale around the outside calendrical scales and these a set of six curves which are neither circular nor are they based on conic sections so they're above that and how did they do it well we didn't know how nationalists did it because normally you would make a table of the function for every 10 degrees then you'd mock favor ten degrees on the instrument dock and then you connect the dots but nationalists didn't do that because if you look more closely there are no dots I do not know how nice of us did this and notice again from Merlin who is the expert on statistics related to medieval astronomy he drew these curves the red ones [Music] one of the red is the accurate and the green is the approximate formula we couldn't figure out which one was used nor could we figure out how they did the coast don't tell me you're tired of instruments because I got a few more here and this is one I like this some of my English colleagues were not happy I tried to show that a highly sophisticated medieval English instrument for timekeeping by the Sun for any latitude which was thought to have been invented in England was actually invented in Baghdad centuries previously the shape of the instrument in the form of a boat is not necessary to the function the mask the Japan rotate [Music] on the main part of the instrument which is this you have here a grid which enables you to find time from the date and the altitude of the Sun and the latitude very complicated formula it's all solved by one instrument now we have Latin texts and we have medieval English texts there must be English insolent no that's not the case they do have boats in Baghdad muscular in Oxford and we found a treatise by habash who was the leading astronomer ninth-century like that describing an instrument which was for finding the time of night by the altitude of various stars and there is the instrument and it works you don't make an instrument for finding timekeeping by the stars if you haven't already made a simpler one for timekeeping by the Sun but my English colleagues will never forgive me the same holds for the most sophisticated calculating device from 15th century Vienna school this is a universal timekeeping device by regiomontanus but he wasn't the first to put it together we have here an ottoman sketch of the same instrument totally unique but there's a little number some way I don't know where little number which says 23 35 23 degrees 35 minutes that is the obliquity of the ecliptic the difference between the ecliptic and the equator and that is a number which went out in the 11th century because the Muslims had better values and certainly the Ottomans had better values by then and so the 23:35 gives it away but this is an instrument that was conceived centuries before like in the 9th century and won't you know I think it's even an atom has a verse Allah I will no massage what is that than enough I'm getting tired too but look at these what's nice is the provenance and I love sundials but Sundaya freaks don't know that the Muslims had an incredible tradition of sundials and mnemonics that's the study of sundials theory and practice and compare these two this is the most sophisticated sundial I can find from the 16th century but look at this one even a shot in the head astronomer and Damascus made this Thunder how did he do it he made tables first with the tables you construct the curves it's 2 meters long and 1 meter world yeah another favorite and Kyle Choi was my academic predecessor he was a German historian of mathematics who was a school teacher and ended up in the university of frankfurt and then unfortunately died as a very early age my first work was devoted was dedicated to Karl Troy because he who was concerned with the Qibla and the mathematical solutions and he was so enamored of the subject he made a map she published in a geographical German journal he said this is what it would look like if you had a map with Mecca at the centre and you could measure the distance and the direction to Mecca from any place on earth well good the year was 1989 this popped up at Sotheby's and again blew my mind because I knew who was that show I had done this before and what is going on here you have a map centered on Mecca with places you can't see the dots but there are dots for places and then these are the names from Cordoba over to Peking and from the Yemen up to northern regions obviously Safavid made in Isfahan signed made in Isfahan about 1650 by somebody who's completely unknown this is the most sophisticated Islamic instrument we ever saw it's totally mind-boggling now that was of course my first no wasn't my first contact with her for crown but you kindly said you will help change this from a book which would cost 500 pounds to a book that would cost 50 and that was very considerate and a good idea no more no more clocks by the time we get to this kind of instrument you have to say that the Muslims and the Europeans have come to a tie that's it because these instruments are the same but different in size but this is what's going on here it's a tie between the astronomers in Istanbul and the astronomers in of Tata Cobra hey and in my however the observatory in Istanbul marked the end of serious Muslim astronomy activity in astronomy I said serious of course astronomy continued into the 19th 20th century finally please look at the design of these star maps on the roots of these astrolabes from 16th century Flanders this distinctive design occurs out of the blue it has no known precedent in medieval Europe each one of these has a sort of cup of glass and why [Music] what is it comfortable compare it with this 16th century Iranian astrolabe star map what do we find but the basmala bismillahirrahmanirrahim written in mirror script one of my favorite our big scripts after the text is written backwards and I would claim that this influenced European reads star maps on asteroids can you imagine that a basmala in mirror script might have influenced this design you might say this shape here that was like an open tulip but tulips were not introduced to the Low Countries until the 17th century in all of these examples it was the Muslim scholars who derived the solutions before the Europeans sometimes long before sometimes we can point to independent developments on the part of the Europeans sometimes Islamic influence is abundantly clear Europeans started borrowing astronomical knowledge from the Muslims texts instruments techniques from the 10th century onwards in al-andalus historians of medieval astronomy have for decades been publishing medieval Latin texts based on Arabic originally it is well known that medieval Arabic were medieval European astronomy was heavily influenced by Islamic astronomy today you have seen how many Renaissance instruments were borrowed from or inspired by Islamic originals in any case they we should have a healthy respect for the Muslim astronomers for they were the leading scholars in their field from the eighth century to the 15th century and their influence was far greater than most people realize thank you thank you so much professor it's a fascinating journey I do apologize for running a bit late I didn't dare stop professor especially that the second part was very a we have to cut short probably the discussion part we plant initially half an hour I'll take pretty questions just please Condit be brief in your question and I Asperger's conduct I'm the hammer demeanor I'm an amateur and all of these things in Europe heliocentrism understand was he resisting quite strongly by the Roman Catholic Church how was he li centricity accepted and spread in the Muslim world or did it spread right about the church churches reaction to the book of Copernicus it was on the forbidden Asst fortunately some people ignore that went on and listen luck in Islam people did write about but their works there was will not sent to other parts of any sumo a good summer is in the article heliocentric a wiki page they do mention the name am i late pointed out is in the panic you see of Maddox that Ashley the most sophisticated us we've ever made kanakam use em which contains the private collection Nanaki [Music] the Simba estimated Coffee of does not have yeah nor is it a real Universal Astra lived in that sense [Music] mr. scogan you're going to ask too late mater pace [Music] one [Music] of the same a stroller showed up maybe and the cataloger [Music] somebody very astute notice took us [Music] mr. king thank you very much for that enlightening talk I don't have a question as much oh sorry I don't have a question as much as a minor point that I'd like you to consider which is very very early on in the talk you bifurcated between Fulke astronomy and real astronomy and although that assessment is probably accurate by and large I think it's noteworthy to mention a few exceptions that we do have in our history in Islamic history the scholars who transition between law and astronomy and the person I have in mind when I'm saying that is none other than the heavyweight Malachy jurist had anybody some coffee anyone familiar with the field would know that man yeah and he's got a monograph on this but also the interesting thing is in his in some of his works he stipulates that it's an obligation upon jurists who discuss these issues cuz these are perennial issues and open among Muslims when does fasting begin when does it end when does our Madonn begin when does it end he stipulates that it's an obligation upon those jurors to acquaint themselves to to learn these there's this science so I just thought it'd be nice to mention that there are exceptions sealers they may be but they do exist thank you you are absolutely right you use the wrong word though you said focused on me and realize from here no focus tirana me and mathematical focus Tirana me means shadows [Music] it means horizon phenomena risings and settings uses its some very much concerned with the Anwar so complicated I'm not going to but my point is that it was a complex system were comprehensive it was comprehensive and [Music] we have even put who wrote a book on each other and what and that's all pre-islamic era bluestone and we troll that's why the winds hit the side of the car stars it's the wings now to your point al-kafi yes yes there I I wrote an article which I should single out for you on people who use the who who were injured both focused on me and mathematical strong and the place where that happened was the Yemen Yemeni astronomy is a fabulous story and fortunately we have a hundred-year manoomin astronomical manuscript and many of them overlap focused on me and mathematical astronomy I had a doctoral student who went through three big focused on me texts by lawyers for her and extracted all the information in the fibula and the protons two volumes that cetacean in Frankfurt now published by brill Petra Schmid Oh is her name I'll give you the details yeah I most historians of science are not interested or don't know anything about focused on I became aware of it as soon as I've written that article Kibler in the encyclopedia of Islam my last sentence is some medieval mosques appear to be in directions that are not these directions proposed by medieval astronomers but I don't know what and then in the article mecca center of the world I presented the evidence from focused roma Kotex and encyclopedias why this was so we should talk more about this because I opened a website recently and put all my stuff on it and I have a very nice article Islamic astronomy published by the British Museum the end of the last century you know get about three readers in a month and nape nearby is Islamic fox tournament astronomy in the service of Islam I got dozens of readers there is interest there should be somebody should translate even Fateh over and somebody should translate all of the other stuff now the this one that I showed this legal text is not bad curavi it's by a guy called Adam ult same period very early very very intelligent he's saying this because there are problems people don't know which direction to praying and since this is the rule and this il Kaabah and jihad raghava is very sensible stuff thank you for the question by this please do join me in thanking [Music] [Applause] and the thanks also to you for being with us tonight and we very much look forward to see you now to events so if you don't mind anyone who hasn't been registered before to do email or any contact details that we could keep you updated for future events thank you so much are you hit I'm not American to see you next time shop thank you so much [Music]

Channel: AlFurqanHeritage

Views: 3,584

Rating: 4.7837839 out of 5

Keywords: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, Islamic Manuscripts, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Maqasid, Shariah, Sharaf Yamani, Islamic Heritage, مؤسسة الفرقان للتراث الإسلامي, المخطوطات الإسلامية, أحمد زكي يماني, مقاصد الشريعة, شرف يماني, التراث الإسلامي, David King, Astronomy in the Service of Islam

Id: KmsixNDb7oo

Length: 101min 31sec (6091 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018