Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Aspects of Islamic Scientific Tradition • 17before the great translation movement (Saliba 2007 and 1994, 16).Saliba also shows how this early astronomical tradition was related toQurāĀnic cosmology. Pre-Islamic astronomy (known as anwa’), whichpredicted and explained seasonal changes based on the rising andsetting of fixed stars, was a subject of interest for QurāĀnic scholars aswell as for the early lexicographers, who produced extensive literatureon the anwa’ and manazil (lunar mansions) concepts (Saliba 1994, 17).The large amount of scientific data and theories that came intothe Islamic scientific tradition from Greek, Persian, and Indiansources were not simply passively translated for later transmissionto Europe. In fact, translated material went through constant anddetailed examination and verification, and was accepted or rejectedon the basis of experimental tests and observations. This process ofscrutiny started as early as the ninth century—that is to say, almostcontemporaneously with the translation movement. The traditionof the production of astronomical tables, for instance, may havebeen inspired by the Ptolemaic Handy Tables tradition, but thetables produced by Muslim astronomers were not merely an Arabicreproduction of Ptolemaic tables; they were the result of astronomicalobservations that began as early as the first half of the ninth centurywith the expressed purpose of “updating the Zijes, inspired by theHandy Tables” (Saliba 1994, 18). Furthermore, as Saliba points out,no astronomer working in the early part of the ninth centurycould still accept the Ptolemaic value for precession, solarapogee, solar equation, or the inclination of the ecliptic.The variations were so obvious that they must have becomeintolerable and could no longer be explained without fullrecourse to a long process of questioning the very foundationof the validity of all the precepts of Greek astronomy. (Saliba1994, 18)This critical attitude toward received material was not accidentalnor a passing phenomenon; among other things, it gave rise toa novel tradition of shukuk literature, which cast doubts on varioustheoretical assumptions of Greek science, called for a reexaminationof observational data, produced texts that dealt with internalcontradictions in each branch of Greek science, and produceda critical attitude toward the translated texts, which spurred a