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Early Islamic Cosmology: Difference between revisions
→False claims of a consensus that the Earth was round: Added section: Aquisition of Greek and Indian astronomical knowledge
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Lightyears (talk | contribs) (Creating sandbox page debunking Islamic claims that Muhammad would have known the Earth was round, and demonstrating he and early Muslims thought it flat) |
Lightyears (talk | contribs) (→False claims of a consensus that the Earth was round: Added section: Aquisition of Greek and Indian astronomical knowledge) |
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Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they thought the Earth to be flat, as explained below. | Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they thought the Earth to be flat, as explained below. | ||
==Aquisition of Greek and Indian astronomical knowledge== | |||
Ptolemy’s Almagest was translated into Arabic in the 8<sup>th</sup> century CE after the Qur’an was completed. Ptolemy recorded in book five of his AlMagest in the mid-2<sup>nd</sup> century CE the discovery of Hipparchus, and of Aristarchus before him, that the sun is much larger than the earth and much more distant than the moon.<ref>Toomer, G. J., Ptolemy and his Greek predecessors, In Astronomy Before the Telescope, Ed. Christopher Walker, p.86, London: British Museum Press, 1996</ref> | |||
Professor Kevin Van Bladel says: | |||
{{Quote||When the worldview of educated Muslims after the establishment of the Arab Empire came to incorporate principles of astrology including the geocentric, spherical, Aristotelian-Ptolemaic world picture – particularly after the advent of the ‘Abbāsid dynasty in 750 – the meaning of these passages came to be interpreted in later Islamic tradition not according to the biblical-quranic cosmology, which became obsolete, but according to the Ptolemaic model, according to which the Quran itself came to be interpreted.<ref>Van Bladel, Kevin, “Heavenly cords and prophetic authority in the Qur’an and its Late Antique context”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 70:223-246, p.241, Cambridge University Press, 2007</ref>}} | |||
Also in the same paper, Van Bladel describes how Christian theologians in the region of Syria in the sixth century CE shared the view that the Earth was flat and the sky or heaven was like a tent above the Earth, based on their reading of the Hebrew scriptures. This was a rival view to that of the churchmen of Alexandria who supported the Ptolemaic view of a spherical Earth surrounded by celestial spheres. He says: | |||
{{Quote||Clearly the Ptolemaic cosmology was not taken for granted in the Aramaean part of Asia in the sixth century. It was, rather, controversial.<ref>Van Bladel, Kevin, “Heavenly cords and prophetic authority in the Qur’an and its Late Antique context”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 70:223-246, p.241, Cambridge University Press, 2007</ref>}} | |||
David A. King writes: | |||
{{Quote||The Arabs of the Arabian peninsula before Islam possessed a simple yet developed astronomical folklore of a practical nature. This involved a knowledge of the risings and settings of stars, associated in particular with the cosmical setting of groups of stars and simultaneous heliacal risings of others, which marked the beginning of periods called naw’, plural anwā’. […] Ptolemy’s Almagest was translated at least five times in the late eighth and ninth centuries. The first was a translation into Syriac and the others into Arabic, the first two under Caliph al-Ma’mūn in the middle of the first half of the ninth century, and the other two (the second an improvement of the first) towards the end of that century […] In this way Greek planetary models, uranometry and mathematical methods came to the attention of the Muslims.<ref>King, David A., “Islamic Astronomy”, In Astronomy Before the Telescope, Ed. Christopher Walker, p.86, London: British Museum Press, 1996</ref>}} | |||
Hoskin and Gingerich say: | |||
{{Quote||In 762 [Muhammad’s] successors in the Middle East founded a new capital, Baghdad, by the river Tigris at the point of nearest approach of the Euphrates, and within reach of the Christian physicians of Jundishapur. Members of the Baghdad court called on them for advice, and these encounters opened the eyes of prominent Muslims to the existence of a legacy of intellectual treasures from Antiquity - most of which were preserved in manuscripts lying in distant libraries and written in a foreign tongue. Harun al-Rashid (caliph from 786) and his successors sent agents to the Byzantine empire to buy Greek manuscripts, and early in the ninth century a translation centre, the House of Wisdom, was established in Baghdad by the Caliph al-Ma’mun. […] Long before translations began, a rich tradition of folk astronomy already existed in the Arabian peninsula. This merged with the view of the heavens in Islamic commentaries and treatises, to create a simple cosmology based on the actual appearances of the sky and unsupported by any underlying theory.''" | |||
<ref>Hoskin, Michael and Gingerich, Owen, “Islamic Astronomy” in The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy, Ed. M. Hoskin, p.50-52, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999</ref>}} | |||
==Evidence of flat Earth beliefs amoung the earliest Muslims== | |||