Did Muhammad and the Earliest Muslims know the Earth is Round?

Knowledge of the spherical nature of the Earth was known for centuries, however distribution of information across the world was not uniform. A commonly held stance is that Muhammad and his companions had this knowledge.

One Islamic fatwah website^[1] (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 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.

ibn Taymiyyah

To do so, they first quote from a book by ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH/1328 CE), who in turn cites Abu’l-Husayn Ahmad ibn Ja‘far ibn al Munadi as saying that the scholars from the second level of the companions of Imam Ahmad (d. 241 AH / 855 CE) – i.e. the early Hanbalis – said there was consensus among the scholars that both heaven and Earth are balls, the latter based on astronomical reasoning. This evidence is worthless, because from the 8th century CE the Muslims had access to Greek and Indian astronomical knowledge (see below), so of course Muslim scholars had this view. The term 'consensus' (ijma) was used in different ways by different scholars, but essentially meant the agreement of Muslim scholars, or ideally, also of the salaf (the first three generations of Muslims)^[2]. In this case it is explicitly the scholars. As we read on, however, it is apparent that even this "consensus" for a round Earth was rather nebulous, and as already mentioned and will see again, those who did endorse a round Earth did so because they were educated people aware of the astronomical arguments.

They then quote ibn Taymiyyah again, who is answering a question about the shape of the heavens and Earth, this time citing Abu’l-Husayn Ahmad ibn Ja‘far ibn al Munadi (again), Abu’l-Faraj ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597 AH / 1201 CE), and ibn Hazm (d. 456 AH / 1064 CE) as saying that there is a consensus that the heavens are round. Notice that despite the topic, he says the heavens, but nothing about the Earth. He says they provided evidence from the Qur'an, sunnah, and narrations from the companions (sahabah) and second generation.

Ibn Taymiyyah continues the passage^[3] giving the supposed evidence for round heavens in the Qur'an, sunnah, and narrations from the early Muslims (not included by the Islamic fatwah website). In between, he argues that a round heavens and Earth is supported by what specialists on tafsir and language have said about certain words in the Qur'an.

It is the hadiths and companions that we are interested in for the purposes of this article (the Qur'an verses cited by ibn Taymiyyah are Quran 21:33, Quran 36:40, Quran 39:5, and Quran 67:5).

Ibn Taymiyyah then mentions the hadith in Sunan Abu Dawud (graded weak) Sunan Abu Dawud 4726 (Dar-us-Salam Ref) in which Muhammad forms a dome with his fingers above his head when saying that Allah's throne is above the heavens. Ibn Taymiyyah's interpretation is that the throne is dome shaped.^[4]

Ibn Taymiyyah then says that a middle only exists in a round thing. How any of this helps demonstrate that the heavens are spherical is a mystery.

Ibn Hazm

The Islamic fatwah website then quotes one of the three that ibn Taymiyyah cited, ibn Hazm, who said that there is sound evidence that the Earth is round, but the common people and some non-leading Muslim scholars thought otherwise, though none of the leading scholars denied that the Earth is round.

So firstly, uneducated people (as were Muhammad and the sahabah) thought the Earth to be flat even in ibn Hazm's day. Secondly, his statement provides no evidence that the earliest scholars actually said the Earth is round (just that leading scholars didn't say it was flat). It is clear that Ibn Hazm and the other followers of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal mentioned above believed in a round Earth for astronomical reasons, even if some of them attempted to find further backup from the Qur'an and sunnah.

Given that Ibn Taymiyyah cites these scholars, the narrations he then uses to support spherical heavens (when asked about the shape of both the heavens and Earth), were presumably the best they could come up with. If a consensus for a round Earth went back to Muhammad and the companions, surely the scholars could come up with better than this feeble evidence.

Even the already dubious claims of just a scholarly consensus are further undermined when we read Tafsir al-Jalalayn, which was written centuries later by two people who were not trying to massage the Qur'an to fit a round Earth reality. For Quran 88:20

For details on this word, sutihat, in verse 88:20, see this section of the flat Earth article.

The website goes on to quote from a 20th century book of fatwas, which claims that the Earth is egg shaped and also makes an argument using verse 39:5, both of which are debunked in the article Flat Earth and the Quran.

So to summarise, there seems to be no evidence available that the earliest Muslims believed the Earth is round. Instead, there is lots of evidence that they thought the Earth to be flat, as explained further below. But before we come to that, let's see what historians have to say about Arab astronomical knowledge.

Ptolemy’s Almagest was translated into Arabic in the 8^th century CE after the Qur’an was completed. Ptolemy recorded in book five of his AlMagest in the mid-2^nd 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, and the Aristotelian view that Earth was spherical and the heavens were celestial spheres.^[5]

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."^[6]

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 heaven, or series of heavens was like a dome or tent above the Earth, based on their reading of the Hebrew and New Testament scriptures. This was a rival view to that of the churchmen of Alexandria who supported the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of a spherical Earth surrounded by spinning celestial spheres. See the footnote below^[7] for excerpts of that chapter, which he summarises by saying:

"Clearly the Ptolemaic cosmology was not taken for granted in the Aramaean part of Asia in the sixth century. It was, rather, controversial."^[8]

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."^[9]

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."^[10]

The spring where the sun sets

In the tafsir of al-Tabari (b. 224 AH / 839 CE) for Quran 18:86, we see the following remarks about the nature of the spring into which the sun sets. The similar sounding words hami'ah (muddy) and hamiyah (hot) seem to have become confused at some point:

So he says of the Basra version:

"بـمعنى: أنها تغرب فـي عين ماء ذات حمأة"

"Meaning: that it sets in a spring of muddy water."

And of the people of Kufa reading hot spring:

"يعنـي أنها تغرب فـي عين ماء حارّة"

"It means that it sets in a spring of hot water"

He goes on to quote various opinions such as Ibn 'Abbas, that the sun sets in black mud:

From these comments and narrations in al-Tabari's tafsir, we can reasonably conclude that many, and perhaps all, of the earliest Muslims took verse 18:86 to mean that the sun actually sets in a spring and thus that the Earth is flat.

If the reader wishes to explore this sub-topic further, they can see how al-Tabari in his History of the Prophets and Kings, and al-Baydawi in his tafsir mention the opinion that the sun has 360 springs into which it can set, and the pre-Islamic Arab poems on the same topic in the article Dhu'l Qarnayn and the Sun Setting in a Muddy Spring.

The sky is a dome above the Earth

In his tafsir for Quran 2:22, al-Tabari includes narrations from some of the earliest Muslims about the sky being a dome or ceiling over the Earth:

Ibn Kathir in his tafsir for Quran 13:2 has yet more narrations of the sahabah and tabi'un (2nd generation) on this topic:

The Earth on the back of a whale

Al-Tabari's tafsir contains other indications of a common flat Earth belief. For example, regarding Quran 68:1, which mysteriously starts with the Arabic letter nun, he (and many other tafsirs) records that one of the interpretations among sahabah such as ibn 'Abbas was that the 'nun' is a whale on whose back the Earth is carried (other interpretations were that it was an inkwell, or a name of Allah). The evidence is extensively documented on other websites including narrations with sahih chains from the sahabah, so the interested reader is referred to them.^[11][12][13]

Narration of companions

Ibn Taymiyyah argued that the companions believed in "round heavens" as he explains ibn 'Abbas' account and others said regarding Quran 36:40

See the comments and footnotes about falak in the article Geocentrism and the Quran (a whirl was a small wheel or hemisphere that span around a spindle^[15]). Now given that the sun and moon appear both to arc across the sky, even to those who imagined the Earth was flat and the heavens a dome (or a sphere), such people would also imagine some path for them continuing beneath the Earth after they have set so they can return whence they came (as also in the hadith from Abu Dharr discussed later in this article). Indeed, this is precisely what we read from ibn 'Abbas as noted by ibn Kathir in his Tafsir for Quran 31:29. The sun runs in its falak (فَلَكهَا) in the sky / heaven (السَّمَاء) during the day, and when it sets it runs during the night (بِاللَّيْلِ - omitted from the translation) in its falak beneath the Earth:^[16]

Ibn Taymiyyah's argument does not account for the shape of the Earth.

• Answering Islam - The Seven Earths
• AnsweringIslamBlog.wordpress.com - Muhammad's Magical Mountain: One Whale of a Tail!
• Answering-Islam.com - The Quran and The Shape of the Earth
• Youtube.com Islam & the whale that carries the Earth on its back - Video by TheMaskedArab