Contesting Cosmographies: Muslim Views of the Cosmos from Late Antiquity to Modernity

This book explores how Muslims have understood the cosmos from late antiquity to the modern period. I draw on genres ranging from kalām treatises, fatwā collections and Qurʾān commentaries to geographies, travelogues and private letters to understand how this has shifted in the longue durée. In the second/eighth century, there were two major cosmographical traditions in Islamdom. According to the first of these, the traditionalist cosmography attested in some of our earliest extant Islamic texts, there are seven domed or vaulted heavens above a series of seven flat earths (with much debate about what lies beneath), each separated by a distance of 500 years’ travel. According to the second view, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition, which drew on texts translated from Greek and Syriac, there are eight or nine celestial spheres encompassing a round earth which rests (immobile) at the centre of the cosmos. These two traditions underwent various changes and reformulations throughout the centuries (e.g. from the fourth/tenth century a nine-sphere model became the standard view in the latter tradition), but their basic features remained stable down to the modern period. Then in the eleventh/seventeenth century, a third cosmography spread to Islamdom: the Copernican tradition (which term I use as a shorthand to include post-Copernican developments). Awareness of this view only really becomes widespread in the late thirteenth/nineteenth century—it remained highly contested in Europe down to the late eleventh/seventeenth century—and it becomes the dominant view in Islamdom by the late thirteenth/nineteenth to the early fourteenth/twentieth centuries.