Arabic versus Greek Astronomy: A Debate over the Foundations of Science

Abstract

This short note is occasioned by the publication of a review essay by A. I. Sabra in this journal, under the title “Conaguring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinematic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy.” Sabra’s review itself was in turn occasioned by the recent publication of four books (all in the 1990s), two of which were written as dissertations by Sabra’s own students and under his own supervision, and the last two were written by the present author. As a review essay, Sabra’s assessment of the books under consideration is rather fair, and as far as his assessment of the present writer’s books is decidedly oattering, and, for all practical purposes, engaging enough to invite the reader to examine those books. Had Sabra’s essay review been only a review, however, it would not have been necessary to bring it once more to the attention of the readers of Perspectives on Science, except maybe to make a corrective statement or two whenever the essay strayed into error. But it proclaims to do more than that. In 52 densely printed pages, it attempts to determine the purpose and character of a whole tradition of astronomical writings that occupied a major place in Islamic civilization for slightly more than a millennium, from the ninth to the twentieth century, a Herculean task in itself. The tradition in question was the one commonly known as the hay’a tradition, whose very name is still problematic since no one has ever been able to demonstrate that the term hay’a had any Greek antecedents. Its beginnings though can be incontestably dated back to the middle of the ninth century if not before, as is evident from the work Kitab al-hay’a (Book on Astronomy) by Qusta. b. Luqa (o. 860), who was not mentioned in Sabra’s essay. Its purpose, as I shall argue below, seems to have been an attempt to set new foundations for the science of astronomy, thus giving