Early Islamic Cosmology

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Introduction

When critics point out that the Qur'anic Earth is flat, or that the author of the Qur'an believed that the sun sets in a muddy spring, apologists will sometimes claim that everyone knew that the Earth was round by the time of Muhammad. This article will dispel this assertion, and as such is complementary to discussions about Islamic cosmography.

False claims of a consensus that the Earth was round

While many people in some regions had known for centuries that the Earth was round and not flat, the question is whether Muhammad and his nearby contemporaries in Arabia had this knowledge.

One Islamic website (copied by others) quotes from scholars who lived hundreds of years after Muhammad in a failed attempt to show that there was always a Muslim scholarly consensus that the Earth is round. They are implying that the Qur'an does not reflect a very human lack of knowledge about the shape of the Earth.

To do so, they first quote from a book by the 20th century Saudi Sheikh ibn Baz (who famously, at one time pronounced that the Earth is flat). He in turn quotes ibn Taymiyah (d. 728 AH/1328 CE), who in turn cites Abu’l-Husayn Ahmad ibn Ja‘far (d. 428 AH / 1037 CE) as saying that the scholars from the second level of the companions of Imam Ahmad (d. 241 AH / 855 CE) are agreed that the sky and Earth is a ball. This evidence is worthless, because from the 8th century CE the Muslims had access to Greek and Indian knowledge, so of course the more recent scholars had this view.

They then quote Sheikh ibn Baz again, this time citing Abu’l-Husayn Ahmad ibn Ja‘far (again), Abu’l-Faraj ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597 AH / 1201 CE), and ibn Hazm (d. 456 AH / 1064 CE), who he says provided narrations from the companions and second generation that the heavens are round. Notice that he says the heavens, not the Earth. A common conception in those days was of a flat Earth in a celestial sphere or hemisphere. So again, this evidence is worthless.

The website then quotes one of the three that he cited, ibn Hazm, who claimed that none of the leading scolars denied that the Earth is round. Thus the website provides no evidence that any of them actually said the Earth is round (at most, the absence of a denial that it is). They go on to quote from a 20th century book of fatwas, which claims that the Earth is egg shaped and also uses verse 39:5, both of which arguments are debunked in the article Qur'anic Flat Earth and the Quran. So to summarise, there seems to be no evidence available to suggest that the earliest Muslims believed the Earth was round.

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 8th century CE after the Qur’an was completed. Ptolemy recorded in book five of his AlMagest in the mid-2nd 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.[1]

Professor Kevin Van Bladel says:

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.[2]

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:

Clearly the Ptolemaic cosmology was not taken for granted in the Aramaean part of Asia in the sixth century. It was, rather, controversial.[3]

David A. King writes:

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.[4]

Hoskin and Gingerich say:

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." [5]

Evidence of flat Earth beliefs amoung the earliest Muslims

  1. ↑ Toomer, G. J., Ptolemy and his Greek predecessors, In Astronomy Before the Telescope, Ed. Christopher Walker, p.86, London: British Museum Press, 1996
  2. ↑ 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
  3. ↑ ibid.
  4. ↑ King, David A., “Islamic Astronomy”, In Astronomy Before the Telescope, Ed. Christopher Walker, p.86, London: British Museum Press, 1996
  5. ↑ 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
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