From Masha' Allah to Kepler by Charles Burnett & Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum

Author:Charles Burnett & Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum [Burnett, Charles & Greenbaum, Dorian Gieseler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907767067
Publisher: Sophia Centre Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

AL‐BĪRŪNĪ ON THE COMPUTATION OF PRIMARY PROGRESSION (TASYĪR)

Jan P. Hogendijk

Introduction

The Masudic Canon (al‐Qānūn al‐Mas‘ūdī) of al‐Bīrūnī in eleven ‘Books’ (or large chapters) is one of the most important works of Islamic astronomy. The work is comparable in size and structure to the Almagest of Ptolemy (ca. 150 CE). Al‐ Bīrūnī completed this work between 1030 and 1040 for sultan Mas‘ūd of Ghazna, now Ghazni in Afghanistan. An overview of the contents of the Masudic Canon can be found in Kennedy’s Studies in the Exact Islamic Sciences.1 Unlike Ptolemy in the Almagest, al‐Bīrūnī added a Book (11) on mathematical astrology, of which Chapter 5 deals with the doctrine of primary progressions. The Arabic text of the Masudic Canon was published in an uncritical edition in India2 which was reprinted in Beirut.3 The work was also translated into Russian under communist rule; one of the translators, Boris Rozenfeld, once remarked to me that it was the first book on astrology that was printed in Russia after the revolution of 1917.4 An English translation of the Masudic Canon would be important for our knowledge of Islamic astronomy but would require many years of highly specialized work. Al‐Bīrūnī wrote in Arabic in a peculiar literary style which is more difficult to understand than the rather straightforward language used by most Islamic mathematicians and astronomers. The appendix to this paper contains a literal translation of Sections 1–4 of Chapter 5 of Book 11, which are related to astrological doctrines of ultimately Greek origin, although some of the mathematical methodology was developed in the Islamic middle ages. I have omitted the final Section 5 of Chapter 5 of Book 11 because it concerns Indian astrology and does not involve advanced mathematics.

I begin the appendix with a translation of al‐Bīrūnī’s cynical introduction to astrology in his preface to Book 11 of the Masudic Canon. Al‐Bīrūnī also shows a sceptical attitude towards astrology in his more elementary Introduction to the Art of Astrology (kitāb al‐tafhīm li‐awā’il ṣinā‘at al‐tanjīm), which he wrote in the form of approximately 500 questions and answers for the daughter of a high dignitary, Rayḥāna bint Ḥasan. In that work, al‐Bīrūnī begins the final section on astrology as follows:

We now mention the subjects in the art of the judgement of the stars [i.e., astrology], because its aim is the solution of the question of a person who asks [something about his future], and because it [astrology] is for the majority of people the fruit of the mathematical sciences, although our opinion about this fruit and this art is similar to the opinion of the minority (translation mine).5

Commentary on Sections 1–4 of Chapter 5 of Book 11 of the Masudic Canon

The following commentary is introductory; mathematical details will be discussed in a subsequent section of this paper on worked examples. In this and the following section I will assume some familiarity with the concept of the celestial sphere, the coordinate systems on the sphere (ecliptical, equatorial, azimuthal), and the basics of spherical trigonometry, as explained, e.g.,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.