Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives

Islam & Science, Summer, 2004 by Muzaffar Iqbal

David Pingree, whose life-long commitment to the history of astronomy, astrology, and astral magic in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, the Muslim world, Byzantium, and medieval Europe has given us numerous new insights into the transmission of these sciences between various cultures, contributes to the volume with an article on the transmission of Islamic science to India. "The Sarvasiddhantaraja of Nityananda" deals with revision of the Zij of Ulugh Beg at the court of the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan at Delhi in the early seventeenth century. This revision was translated into Sanskrit by Nityananada, but because the Hindu astronomers were not familiar with the Islamic tradition, this work was not well received. Nityananada then decided to write a Sanskrit apology for Islamic astronomy called Sarvasiddhantaraja; Pingree presents a detailed analysis of chapters 2 and 3 of this work which deals with the computation of the mean and true longitudes of the planets. This chapter sheds light on many neglected aspects of transmission of Islamic astronomy to India and the influence of this transmission.

"On the Lunar Tables in Sanjaq Dar's Zij al-Sharif", the tenth chapter of the book by Julio Samso, professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Barcelona, draws our attention to the complex issues related to the transmission of scientific knowledge between the eastern and western realms of the Muslim world. The Andalusian astronomical tradition of the ninth through the eleventh centuries had numerous unique features, one of these being the existence of special theories to explain the oscillation in the ecliptic longitudes of all fixed stars with respect to the vernal point. This phenomenon, called "trepidation", was widely studied in the Maghrib, but astronomers of the eastern Islamic astronomical tradition such as Muhyi al-Din al-Maghribi and Ibn al-Shatir rejected trepidation; their theories were transmitted to the Maghrib during the late 14th century and, though the astrologers in the Maghrib continued to use the older Andalusian astronomy, more sophisticated Eastern astronomical tradition found favor with the astronomers and muwaqqits--the official time keepers in the mosques. Samso explores the influence of the Zij of Ulugh Beg, which was transmitted to the Maghrib in the 17th century, on Zij al-Sharif ("Noble Astronomical Handbook") by Sanjaq Dar of Tunis.

Ahmed Djebbar's article, "A Panorama of Research on the History of Mathematics in al-Andalus and the Maghrib between the Ninth and Sixteenth Centuries" is one of the most important surveys of research on the history of medieval mathematics and astronomy. It covers the period between 1834 and 1980. Djebbar, who is professor of History of Mathematics at Lille University, has previously published Une histoire de la science arabe (2001) and La vie et l'oeuvre d'Ibn al-Banna: un essai biobibliographique (2001), and he covers both the Arabic sources and the Western literature in his survey. The importance of this survey lies in its synthetic descriptions and in its clear expositions on what needs to be further studied in this area.