Event Date
Ideas concerning the structure, shape and configuration of the cosmos feature in some of the earliest extant written works of the Arabo-Islamic tradition, including the Qurʾān commentary of Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 150/767) and the biography of the Prophet of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767). These early texts present us with a view of creation drawn largely from late ancient Jewish sources, variously re-worked and supplemented, a tradition that would continue to find defenders writing in Arabic well into the modern period. An alternative view, drawing on the corpus of Greek, Syriac and Middle Persian texts translated into Arabic from the second/eighth century onwards, first found support among specialists in the astral sciences and philosophers before spreading among the broader mass of the learned class. This lecture explores the long and complex history of the interaction of these rival ways of viewing the world, and their eventual displacement by Copernicanism.