F. Jamil Ragep

Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks:

Based upon research over the past half century, there has been a growing recognition that a number of mathematical models used by Copernicus had originally been developed by Islamic astronomers. This has led to speculation about how Copernicus may have learned of these models and the role they played in the development of his revolutionary, heliocentric cosmology. Most discussion of this connection has thus far been confined to fairly technical issues related to these models; recently, though, it has been argued that the connections may go deeper, extending into the physics of a moving Earth and the way in which astronomy itself was conceived. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of these possible connections between Copernicus and his Islamic predecessors and to discuss some of their implications for Copernican studies.

Duhem, the Arabs, and the history of cosmology

Duhem has generally been understood to have maintained that the major Greek astronomers were instrumentalists. This view has emerged mainly from a reading of his 1908 publication To Save the Phenomena. In it he sharply contrasted a sophisticated Greek interpretation of astronomical models (for Duhem this was that they were mathematical contrivances) with a naive insistence of the Arabs on their concrete reality. But in Le Système du monde, which began to appear in 1913, Duhem modified his views on Greek astronomy considerably; his more subtle understanding included the recognition that many Greeks subordinated mathematical astronomy to physical theory. But he could not completely repudiate his earlier views about Greek astronomy in part because his extreme nineteenth century prejudices led him to continue to insist on a clear-cut demarcation between Greek and Arabic astronomy. The inevitable result is a certain unevenness in the Système and some glaring inconsistencies.

Ibn al-Shāṭir and Copernicus : the Uppsala notes revisited

It has long been recognized that Copernicus’ models in the Commentariolus bear a striking resemblance to those of Ibn al-Shāṭir (14th-c. Damascus). A number of scholars have postulated some sort of transmission but have denied that Ibn al-Shāṭir’s geocentric models had anything to do with the heliocentric turn. Rather, the assumption has been that they were used by Copernicus solely to resolve the irregular motions of the planetary deferents brought on by Ptolemy’s equant. Based on proposals for direct transformations of Ibn al-Shāṭir’s models into those of Copernicus and an alternative reading of Copernicus’ so-called Uppsala notes, it is argued here that Ibn al-Shāṭir’s models in fact have a “heliocentric bias” that made them particularly suitable as a basis for the heliocentric and “quasi-homocentric” models found in the Commentariolus.

Archimedes Among the Ottomans: An Updated Survey

This paper provides a survey of Archimedean material that was produced and disseminated during the Ottoman period, mainly in the city of Istanbul. Moving from the founding figures of Ottoman science such as Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī and Muḥlammad al-Fanā in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Muṣṭafā Ṣidqī in the eighteenth-century, the article discusses Ottoman work in several areas of Archimedean mathematics and science: 1) the number Pi; 2) Hydrostatics and Specific Gravity of Elements, for which an edition of a unique manuscript by Taqī al-Dīn al-Rāṣid is given in an appendix; 3) Geometry (e.g. the sphere and cylinder, squaring the circle, trisecting an acute angle, heptasecting a circle, and spiral lines). From an examination of the content of texts and extant manuscript witnesses, it is clear that Ottoman work on the Archimedean corpus owed a great debt to emigree scholars and was closely connected with major Islamic centers oflearning such as the Marāgha Observatory and the Samarqand School; at the same time Ottoman scholars themselves made numerous contributions to the Archimedean heritage.

New Light on Shams: The Islamic Side of Σὰμψ Πουχάρης

This chapter tries to cover some information about elusive Shams, who undertook to teach the Greek Chioniades astronomy and provide him with valuable texts, despite whatever reservations Shams and others in Tabriz had. It explores the intellectual context of Tabriz in which this transmission took place and the sources of some of the material Chioniades took back with him to Byzantium. Chioniades returned to Trebizond in the late 1290s and was in Constantinople by April 1302. By 1315, he was in Trebizond, where he lived as a monk until his death around 1320. Chioniades got his apprenticeship into Islamic astronomy with the purported works of Shams al-Dīn, which are found in Greek translation in some of the manuscripts, contain any of the newer material from the Maragha and Tabriz observations and whether the Persian Syntaxis of Chrysococces, which he says comes from the work of Chioniades, contains this new material. Keywords: Chioniades; Islamic astronomy; Shams al-Dīn; Tabriz; Trebizond

Islamic Reactions to Ptolemy’s Imprecisions

Consider the following quotation from the author of the treatise Fī sanat al-shams (“On the Solar Year”), most likely written in Baghdad in the first part of the ninth century:

Book Review: A Muslim Cosmology: Islamic Cosmology: A Study of as-Suyūtī's al-Hay'a as-sanīya fī l'hay'a as-SunnīyaIslamic Cosmology: A study of as-Suyūtī‘s al-Hay'a as-sanīya fī l'hay'a as-sunnīya with critical edition, translation and commentary. (Beiruter Texte und Studien, Band xxvii.) HeinenAnton M. (Franz Steiner Verlag, Beirut, 1982). Pp. viii + 289 + 81 in Arabic. DM78.

can be dismissed as insignificant. The first, though, may be the most widely read of all Mary Somervilles books, as it was used long after her death as a secondary school text throughout the English-speaking world. Physical geography marked no decline from the high standard of past Somerville work; it was one of the first books to apply the concept of the conservation of energy to the calculation of the quantity of heat absorbed and emitted by the surface of the Earth. Patterson gives a detailed account of Mary Somervilles social contacts, but she does not do justice to Somervilles scientific work, which was certainly equally important in earning her eminence in the male world of Victorian science. Furthermore, since this book is about the life of one of the few successful Victorian women of science, it seems strange that Patterson never addresses in general the rarity of female scientists in the Victorian period. Pattersons discussion of Mary Somerville seems to imply that science was fully open to able, well-born, and socially acceptable women. If that is true, however, why did so few women follow Somervilles example in the successful pursuit of a scientific career? In neglecting this question, Patterson skirts the most interesting issue suggested by the story of Mary Somerville.