In his seminal essay, Situating Arabic Science: Locality vs. Essence, A.I. Sabra sought to establish both the importance of studying Islamic science on its own terms at the local level, and to situate the importance of Islamic contributions within broader narratives in the history of science. Since then, while there have certainly been enormous strides in local histories of science in Islamicate societies, situating Islamic science with respect to broader narratives has very often led to the Islamic world playing only a peripheral role to the predominantly Eurocentric narratives about the development of science. In the case of astronomy, George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, and Jamil Ragep’s essays “Copernicus and his Islamic Predecessors,” and “Ali Qushji and Regiomontanus,” are important works of scholarship that illustrate how much European narratives of science are indebted to the Islamic astronomical tradition. However, they also serve to reinforce the notion that there’s primarily one history of science that matters, a European history, in which Muslims played an important part. The subject of astrology complicates these already existing tensions. In one respect, early Arabic astrological thought (8th-11th c. CE) was highly influential in premodern Europe, and this history has been almost entirely ignored. This paper explores possibilities for how best to recount this narrative without falling into the historiographic trap outlined by Sonia Brentjes (“The Prison of Categories”). In another respect, local histories of astrology within the Islamic world have been guilty of dismissing the discipline, as it does not fit into an “Islamic science” that contributes to the progressive, Western history of science. In this paper, I look especially at George Saliba’s claim that the astronomical discipline of hay’a was formulated in large part because Muslim astronomers sought to liberate themselves from the Greek astrological trappings of pure astronomy. While it’s true that astrology had many critics, several hay’a authors continued to produce astrological works for centuries. To conclude the paper, I provide several examples that show that specific, very local contexts are necessary to determine the extent to which astrological questions informed astronomical research and methods.

Efforts to explain the nature of the lunar spots (or lunar maria) in the premodern Islamic literature were not limited to one field of intellectual inquiry. The issue, rather, falls at the intersection of six major fields: optics, natural philosophy, hay'a (cosmology), kalam (Islamic philosophical theology), Tafsir (Qur'anic exegeses), and hadith (Prophetic Tradition). Writing in each field, different scholars (or sometimes a single scholar), would come up with different hypotheses regarding the nature of the lunar spots. This paper traces these discussions from the tenth to the fourteenth century as presented in the works of Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi. I show how the paradigms of the field in which they were writing shaped their understanding of their research problem, affected their choice of criteria for classifying and sifting through the existing hypotheses, and influenced the conception of their own hypothesis. For instance, writing in the field of optics, Ibn al-Haytham considers the lunar spots to be a visually perceived scenery the quiddity of which can be successfully explained through his theory of light. Whereas, Avicenna, who brings up the issue in al-Sama' wa al-'alam of his al-Shifa', sees the lunar spots as a challenge to the simplicity of the celestial bodies (a key principle in his celestial physics) that can be resolved through a physical hypothesis that explains their cause. Moreover, I show that the lunar spots were not always a phenomenon to be explained or a problem to be solved, but sometimes an intellectual tool used by the occasionalist theologians against philosophers.

Ulugh Beg’s 15th c. Samarqand observatory and madrasa is one of the most famous Islamic scientific institutions, producing astronomical observations that were not equalled until Tycho Brahe. Less is known about the processes of research and education at Samarqand, but a number of commentaries produced by Samarqand scholars promise to shed light on the intellectual life of the classroom. Instruction in the sciences was primarily an aural process, in which students listened as a text was read aloud, with frequent breaks for the instructor to comment and elaborate. However, as anyone who has perused the Almagest can attest, it is quite difficult to visualize the complex and dynamic motions produced by the mathematical machinery of eccentrics and epicycles without the aid of images. Historians of the mathematical sciences overwhelmingly focus on the text (geometric proofs, numerical parameters) and have scarcely paid attention to the role of manuscript images in transmitting knowledge, typically considering geometric diagrams as ancillary to the proofs. But astronomical manuscripts contain other images, not related to proofs, that convey meaning to the reader as well, and in many cases are more helpful than geometric diagrams in illustrating how a model functions or a phenomenon occurs. In this paper, I explore the ways in which manuscript diagrams and illustrations worked in conjunction with the text in astronomical commentaries written by the director of the Samarqand observatory Qadizade al-Rumi, and one of his prominent students Fathallah al-Shirwani. Using examples of how these commentators portrayed the components and motions of complex models, as well as more basic celestial phenomena, I describe how students could begin to put together an impression of how they combined to produce the apparently irregular motions we observe in the heavens, as well as the outstanding problems of Ptolemaic planetary models that these astronomers were attempting to explain and resolve. I analyze the extent to which images may have helped the reader visualize different kinds of motion and extrapolate from two-dimensional static “mathematical” images to the three-dimensional dynamic “physical” motions of the heavens. I suggest that differences in the kinds of images each commentator chose to add to their texts, the manner in which they portrayed the models and particular motions, and the ways in which they highlighted and analyzed different problems reflect differences in the intended audiences for the two commentaries.

Studying science in the Ottoman, and indeed in any other non-Western, context is often deemed unthinkable without relating the subject in question to a real or imaginary Western/European connection. Any study on astral sciences in the early modern Ottoman or Islamicate context, for instance, is expected to address the question of heliocentrism (or lack thereof), to refer to the possible contributions of Ottoman/Muslim achievements to the works of Copernicus and Galileo, or to exemplify at least the "cross-cultural exchanges" with their Western/European counterparts. Calls for writing a global history of science in the early modern era may sound in the first place as a welcome development. However, many a time, the global histories of science quickly turn into bodies of narratives reminiscent of nineteenth-century world fairs where the individual pavilions of non-western nations representing the exotica (read "achievements") of their home cultures serve only for feeding the hegemony of the host country in the West. What is, thus, sorely needed is treating the local contexts of scientific production and consumption in the Ottoman and/or Islamicate world on their own terms without necessarily measuring their value against any standard imposed by considerations of science in the Western/European context. As a case study, I will focus in this paper on the genre of the astrological almanacs (taqwim), a truly global form of scientific writing that bears crucial local insights into understanding the culture and politics of astral sciences in the early modern Ottoman context. By looking at the production process of these annual tables based on daunting mathematical/astronomical calculations and at the reception of the astrological predictions by their target audience, I will demonstrate how these sorely untapped sources from the fifteenth through even the twentieth century can indeed reveal the multi-layered nature of astral sciences in a local Muslim empire.