A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Timur and the Timurids 129
faculty, for this madrasa, like most others, also functioned as a boarding
school.Each unit, apparently housing two students, consisted of a closet,
a bedroom, and a living room.At each of the four corners of the entire
complex stood a minaret.The walls are decorated with several types of
tiles and bricks of exquisite design and workmanship.The school also
had a hammam (bath) noted for its beautiful mosaics.Finally the inscriptions
adorning the building, some bearing Ulugh Beg’s name, others
making such statements as “The search for knowledge is every Muslim’s
duty,” deserve attention.
The school’s main interest of course rests on the accomplishments of
the scholars whom Ulugh Beg gathered there.It included such mathematicians
and astronomers as Kadizade Rumi, a Turk from Bursa,
Ghiyath al-din Kashi, a Persian from Kashan, and Ali Qushchi, a
Central Asian Turk and thus the prince’s compatriot.Both the origins
and eventual destinies of these people are revealing for the cosmopolitan
intellectual climate then prevailing in the Dar al-Islam.The community
could achieve brilliant results in the exact sciences that still matched
those of contemporary Europe, if it was stimulated by an inspired
sponsor like Ulugh Beg.Without such support, however, scientists had
little institutional framework within which to develop and flourish.
Moreover, in Central Asia they had to compete not only with conventional
learning represented by the madrasa as a theological seminary,
but also with a rising tide of religious fervor that found its growing institutional
framework in the form of a new Sufi order, the Naqshbandi
tariqa of dervishes.After Ulugh Beg’s time, it was the latter – about
whom more will be said below – who set the intellectual tone in their
society.This is also reflected by the example of Ali Qushchi: the noted
mathematician left Samarkand for Tabriz and ultimately was invited to
Istanbul by another enlightened sponsor, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet
the Conqueror.
The achievements of the Samarkand group are intimately linked with
the aforementioned observatory, about which a few words should be said
as well.First of all, it must be emphasized that we are dealing with the
period before the invention of the telescope (Galileo was the first to use
this instrument in 1609).Secondly, the Samarkand observatory had by
the nineteenth century so completely disappeared that only archeological
excavations undertaken in 1908 managed to identify its location and
unearth its extant portion.Subsequent study has led to the partial reconstruction
of a giant quadrant whose segment measured 40.2 meters; it
was aligned along the meridian with its southern segment consisting of