Wonders, Travels and Scientific Knowledge: Reading al-Sirafi

We recently completed our reading of Sulaymān al-Mahrī’s Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres (Mir’āt al-sallāk li-kurāt al-aflāk), a primer of astronomy for the use, we believe, of mariners and navigators. Only a few indications relate this text to the several other works by al-Mahrī, which are a totally different genre, that of nautical handbooks, and it is in fact remarkable that it is called Mirror of Travellers, because nothing in its contents is obviously related to travelling. It is a rather dry primer of astronomy, not the usual applied uranography of the navigators, i.e. how to use the risings, settings and relative positions of constellations and stars for orientation, but instead drawing directly from the long tradition of Graeco-Arabic astronomic treatises, like Jaghmini’s Mulakhas fī al-hay’a. But anyway, we have written about it in previous posts here.

Perhaps because we were left yearning for that “travelling” offered by the title, this year we are about to start on a well-known work that will surely deliver on this aspect, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s al-Sahīh min akhbār al-bihār wa-‘ajā’ibihā (something like True Stories of the Seas and their Wonders). These travel narratives have been sourced for centuries by historians and geographers, not least students of nautical science, for their valuable data shedding light on the Indian Ocean culture of the Middle Ages.

Delving into this kind of literature with our group, devoted as we are to history of science and technology, makes me think of two ways in which travel and marvels literature benefit the science historian. One is very obvious and it has to do with data and information: simply, there is a wealth of unique or little known phenomena, early mentions of crucial little pieces of information relevant to this or that modern discipline, the name of a place or person, the description of a species, an astronomical occurrence, a linguistic quirk… Very literally, there is no end to the variety.

But there is another less obvious benefit for us in this pursuit: confronting the marvellous, the amazing, incredible and outrageous helps us keep open the door of wonder, to keep a certain kind of humbleness in our gaze. This is directly related to one of the cryptic and haunting aphorisms of Heraclitus: ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον (DK18), “The unexpected shall not be found if it is not expected, for it is beyond searching, impenetrable.”

Good pathbreaking science, the real burning pursuit of knowledge, requires from us always, among other attitudes, the capacity for wonder, the cultivated sense of marvel, a childlike disposition towards the unknown, that open door which might allow us to find otherwise invisible realities. It is as if giving up all bearings with a scientific trust in the unknown. The sense of adventure, of intellectual adventure, “Mi lascio portare dalla fortuna per avere buona fortuna.”

And it is with this intention that we will be starting our semester readings. If you have some Arabic and want to join us, we start this Thursday at 10:00 GMT, on Zoom. You may contact us through the RUTTER website. [Juan Acevedo]

Heavenly Bodies and Their Accidents

As we continue our weekly readings of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’at al-salak (Mirror of Travellers; see our previous post), wondering about the relation between cosmography and geography and navigation, as in one of the recent RUTTER Blog posts, we have come across an interesting live example of “saving the phenomena”, straight from the 16th-century Arabian Peninsula.

The context is Ptolemaic through-and-through, with al-Mahrī explaining in Chapter 5 what relates to the “accidents” of the planets in their courses. He takes a while to describe the mechanics of planetary movement, dwelling on the details of retrogradation which were so fundamental to the whole Ptolemaic edifice. So we need to brush up conscientiously on our pre-modern astronomy terms in Arabic, the epicycles, deferents, with their apogees and perigees, to follow carefully the exposition. But then, after a thorough explanation, we come across the following,

Now, it is obvious that the heavenly bodies bring to completion the circular movement inside their orb without experiencing any alteration that touches on the orb. For their movement is neither faster nor slower, nor do they go backwards on their path, or halt their movement in the actual fact itself (nafs al-amr). But all this has to do with the relation between our vision (hasab ru’yatinā) and the composition of the movements (tarkīb al-harakāt).

While it has become commonplace to cite Aristotle on the matter of “saving the phenomena”, it is well known that from the earliest times of Greek philosophy there was a tension between the perfect motion of the spheres—cf. Timaeus, “time is the moving image of eternity”—and the perceived irregularity of the astronomical phenomena. Most notable and seminal are the Platonic passages in Timaeus, Epinomis and the Laws, but for example, and more directly astronomical, here is Geminus of Rhodes (1st century BC),

The Pythagoreans, who were the first to apply themselves to investigations of this kind, assumed the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets to be circular and uniform. They would not admit, with reference to things divine and eternal, any disorder such as would make them move at one time more swiftly, at one time more slowly, and at another time stand still.

Ptolemy (Almagest III, 1 and XIII, 2) is very clear about preserving as much as possible the simplicity of the models (Gr. hypotheseis), and the Middle Ages saw countless back and forth arguments on this matter, which might be said to be a conversation, at times heated!, between cosmology and cosmography, what we know to be de iure, and what we perceive to be de facto. It is all a series of disputationes maybe, lively and truly philosophical. How remarkable, then, that an unassuming Yemeni pilot of the 16th century, man of praxis and adventure, should join the conversation, echoing in his clear, matter-of-fact discourse, the arguments of so many centuries before him—from Pythagoras to al-Mahrī, just a blink of a scientific eye! [JA]

Circles and Stars Between Cosmology and Cosmography

The recently-opened Lisbon exhibition “The Emperor’s Gift: Circles of Knowledge” brings to light a recently-discovered 19th-century Arabic manuscript, a (literally) dizzying and (literally) encyclopaedic collection of circular diagrams and tables covering all the topics between heaven and earth. In fact, this Gulbenkian manuscript, called in Arabic Tuhfat al-Khaqan: Dawa’ir al-‘Ulum wa-Jadawil al-Ruqum (The Emperor’s Gift: Circles of the Sciences and Tables of the Numerals), is organized thematically in a way that reminds us of medieval encyclopaedias, notably from Ming China, following the tripartite arrangement of Heaven–Earth–Man (Tian–Di–Ren) or, roughly, cosmogony/cosmology–geography–beliefs/psychology.

The manuscript is literally dizzying because the convoluted paths of minuscule lettering force the reader to turn the head or turn the text in many ways to be able to follow: you actually have to “get your head round it”! And it is literally encyclopaedic because the great part of its contents is about transmitting a teaching (Gr. paideia) in a circular format (Gr. enkyklon): “a teaching in circles” is as literal a rendering of the Greek enkyklopaideia as we can get. This makes us think a lot about the conceptual and visual power of the circle.

Mirza Muhammad al-Akhbari, Tuhfat al-khaqan, 19th-c. MCG manuscript, fols. 2v-3r.

And in turn (how else?), from our particular RUTTER angle, thinking of navigation, orientation, windroses, and rhumb diagrams, we realise that this exhibition is at heart about one of the fundamental questions in philosophy of science: that of mathematical realism, in a Pythagorean and Galilean way, revived in our days by the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH). The question, succinctly put, is, how can we explain that material reality be so adequately described by mathematical formulas and geometrical diagrams?

Sundial, courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan.

Even only grazing this topic, needless to say, exceeds the scope of these brief lines, but let us suggest that a useful answer may be related, once again, to the Great Triad (三才 sancai) of Chinese cosmology, to a certain essential correspondence, a very familiar je ne sais quoi shared by Heaven, Earth and Man, that is, the physical order of the world beyond the earth, the order of our planet, and the properties of our mental apparatus, our consciousness. The key underlying “forms” to study, consider, and contemplate, are three: orthogonality (the grid), concentricity and radiality. This manuscript, and the extremely suggestive Gulbenkian exhibition are at once evocative, aesthetically delightful, and seriously provocative in the best philosophical way. They are welcome in every way in our times of sound bites and attention-stealing technology. [J. Acevedo]

Cosmic Navigation and Cosmic Pilots

As we embark on a new academic year with our Arabic reading group, we start more in earnest to tackle the pages of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’at al-salak li-kurat al-aflak (Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres), a primer of astronomy for the education of maritime pilots in the early 15th century. Not so much of a primer really, but more like an intermediate-level handbook of cosmography.

The first pages tell us about the order of the heavenly orbs, how the universe is conceived as… an onion (that’s my image, not al-Mahri’s!), or more elegantly, as a compound of concentric spheres, within each of which move the planets or other heavenly bodies. It all starts from the centre of the earth, with the description of the elemental spheres wrapped around it: water, air, fire. This cosmology is of course in all its basics an Aristotelian cosmology, found in numerous accounts over most of ancient and medieval Eurasia. Latin versions abound, including some beautifully illustrated.

Gautier de Metz, 13th century.

Approximately at the same time that al-Mahri was writing his works, Iberian nautical science was being revolutionised by the incorporation of astronomical precision techniques to the extensive tried and tested savoir-faire of the pilots. Long-distance oceanic navigation elicited, or rather forced, technoscientific developments which brought its practitioners to new levels of skill. And yet, East or West, either in Atlantic or Indian Ocean waters, there is the lingering question: Did they really need to know about the system of the cosmos in order to take a ship from A to B? And if they did not need to know those cosmic subtleties, why did they keep learning them? Why would such a practical pilot as al-Mahri, who wrote excruciatingly detailed route descriptions, care to elaborate so much on what was practically philosophical knowledge? Was it just didactic inertia, a superstitious repetition of old doctrines?

The answer is most likely “No, they did not need to know,” just as a mechanic fixing a carburetor does not need to know the laws of physics, or a butcher the details of embryology. A more interesting question may be asked, though, especially in our times, when all the cosmology and astronomy of the nautical sciences has been encapsulated in little devices which use satellite geo-positioning technology, like GPS. The question, and we are only left to ponder, is How did that knowledge impact their navigation? Did it have any practical influence, or was it just a matter of “depth”, of ”taste” (sapere, saber, dhawq) added to the mental framework of the pilots? Next time you meet a 15th-century pilot, we know what to ask him! [JA]

A Great Book Read in Good Company

After months of slow travel between the dangerous reefs and sand banks of the Red Sea coast, tacking northwards through narrow channels, sometimes against the current!, along rows of half-sunk islets and rocks, we have come to the end of chapter 12 of Ibn Majid’s Fawa’id, “On the Red Sea”. And so we come to the end of the book, closing a three-year long cycle (around one hundred meetings), tackling head-on every week the challenges posed by a very technical 500-year-old Arabic manuscript. It is worth pausing for a minute to reflect on the book as a whole, and also on the format of our group reading.

The lingering question, almost as an aftertaste, is still about the readership of the book. The Fawa’id is, explicitly, the work of the old age of a veteran sea captain, full of diversions as he brings up literary rarities in the middle of technical discussions, rambling and then coming back to his topic. It is in turn charming, bewildering, puzzling and annoying, but always informative. Now, who would read this among the pilots and the sea folk? One fascinating detail, partly as an answer, is that centuries later we find excerpts of the Fawa’id copied verbatim in very technical seafaring manuals called rahmanaj. These newer manuals are opening new vistas into the evolution and spread of Indian Ocean nautical literature, and we are already working on this “continuation” of the story.

Speaking of readership, isn’t it amazing that so long after its composition we have gathered every week for over three years to jointly decipher and comment every line? Some texts like the Fawa’id are called “classics”—understanding that the label can be applied more or less loosely, and that there are variations of quality among them. They elicit an interest century after century, and more specifically, it is as if they issue a permanent invitation for collegial engagement: “Hey, get some friends together to read me!”, or maybe, more solemnly: “Tolle, lege!”

This perennial convocation of the great books is at the unchanging basis of what was called in medieval Europe the communio or universitas magistrorum, the “society of masters”, those who had been prepared to read and understand the texts. The Latin version of our saying “three’s company,” is in fact tres faciunt collegium, which can be interpreted as “three make a college,” meaning that in the quest for knowledge, you cannot “go it alone”—non solus!.

Like all major institutions, universities undergo change: study methods evolve, governance errs and finance creeps in, and, in short, the flesh is weak. But if you go ahead and find yourself the closest group of at least three who are responding to the appeal of a great book, do know that there, sharing doubts and certainties, and exposing your ignorance and your knowledge around a central text, you will be back at the root, reviving and strengthening the essence of the university. [Juan Acevedo]

Libraries of the East, Libraries of the West

Ten days of archival work in Cairo bring to my mind strongly the words of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “The East is not quite just East, and the West is not quite just West” (lā al-sharqu sharqun tamāman wa-lā al-gharbu gharbun tamāman). In spite of our facile view of a compartmentalised world, and in spite of stark superficial differences, this insightful observation applies in many fields of human culture. The great libraries of the world, and in particular the great collections of manuscripts, confirm the poet’s intuition, insofar as they owe their very existence and appeal to materials from disparate origins and from a wide range of chronological origins.

It is beyond question that you will find more Italian manuscripts at the Vatican, and more Arabic manuscripts at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, or French works in Paris, but what really characterises the great collections is that, like complex geological formations, they consist of layer upon layer of historical endowments. This is how, on one hand, they put things rightly in perspective, by showing how dynasties and temporal powers wane in the face of the timeless quest for knowledge, and on the other hand, by opening unexpected avenues of research and presenting the researcher with surprising choices, with prompts to re-think hypotheses, and in short, to do the living work of science, by mercurially adapting, and fine-tuning again and again the delicate balance between phenomena (what we find—or finds us!) and our theories (how we make sense of the findings).

Now, to add a dimension to Darwish’s sentence, and so to share it as it were from the horse’s mouth, I would suggest that the great manuscript collections also teach us that, “The Middle Ages are not quite just Middle Ages, and Modernity is not quite just Modernity.”

Clear periodisation becomes easier and convincing the more we distance ourselves from the manuscript sources. I mean, it is very easy to draw chronological boundaries and razor sharp periods when we are dealing with secondary literature, when we are comfortable in the coziness of the printed page, but when we face the centuries-old accrual of material from before the countries we know, from obscure origins in cities now extinct, and facing even more obscure transmission lines, we have to be chronologically humble, and to tread carefully, lets we are unfaithful to the evidence. In actual manuscript “reality”, there is an intertwining of ages, a beautiful and exhilarating sense of the interpenetration of historical periods which is partly what makes working with primary sources so inspiring, exciting, and challenging! [Juan Acevedo]

A Planet-Less Nautical Astronomy

From the RUTTER crew conversations logbook, preserved for posterity: We have been wondering at the early modern pilots of the Indian Ocean, who famously used complex combinations of stars to navigate by night—a catalogue of about 150 celestial bodies was in their treatises— but, and here’s the question, without ever even bothering to mention the planets. By this I mean the five known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The same planets without which Ptolemy’s astronomy would have been reduced to nothing, and the same planets without which astrology would have been unimaginable.

The reason for this absence is obvious, and it is a nice etymological lesson. A planet, as is well known, means in the original Greek a “wanderer”, a “vagabond”. Now, if you are going to depend on guidance through the night and through the vast expanse of the ocean, you cannot rely on something changeable. You need fixed, unchanging points of reference, and this is exactly what was provided by the night sky, those wanderers excepted.

How bright they are, and unflickering! We have just been witnessing in Lisbon the approach and conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, every day, in the sunset sky, very impressive. And yet for all their steady light, they are not good for navigation: one day they are here, next day there, one day going straight, next day retrograding… They are strong, but fickle. The importance that they have in the astrological view of the cosmos is quite indicative of the variable state of the world: matters of the world and we are not ruled by stars, which would make us constant, but by those wandering bright lights.

Photo: Jorge Rodrigues da Silva

The lack of importance that the planets have in navigation is, in turn, quite indicative of the nature of this craft, and of how special is the state of being at sea and being in transit to a destination: there is peril, and there is the urgency to reach a place, and so all the variable concerns of the pilot are subordinate to accomplishing his task, as Ibn Mājid says, “going and returning with the passengers and the cargo safe.” [JA]

Infirmities of Time

As a new Gregorian year sets in, and as we start a new year of Arabic readings, this week’s passage of Ibn Mājid’s Fawā’id could not be more appropriate for a good reflection on the passing of time.

In one of his trademark digressions from the hard technical details of his craft, Ibn Mājid launches into a lengthy poem lamenting the swift passage of time, speaking of lovers in the night, turtledoves, wine and stringed instruments—all the usual imagery of medieval Arabic love poetry—“pierced by dawn and by the muezzin’s voice as if by an arrow.” All this, remember, at the end of a lengthy chapter on sailing seasons, and on the calendrical accuracy and traditional knowledge needed to travel safely across the Indian Ocean. And then comes his reflection after the poem,

“It may be that the monsoon (sailing season) too is afflicted by time with some illness which our minds cannot begin to grasp. Because it is said that every year the season comes later by a quarter of a day of the sphere.”

Layla Visits Majnun in the Palm Grove, page from a 16th-c. manuscript (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

This ingenious return from the romance of the previous verses to the chapter’s subject matter gives us concrete scientific indications and also a cosmological subtlety.

The scientific indication has to do with the specific solar calendar used by the Arab pilots at the time. It is known that it was a variation of the Yazdgerdi calendar, itself a development of the Zoroastrian calendar, but it is hard to pin down exactly which variant. Here it seems clear that it was a calendar of 365 days without any adjustment for the extra quarter of a day (the tropical year has roughly 365 days and a quarter), and this explains the fact that the seasonal dates were shifting, one day every four years—a known feature of some of the early Persian calendars.

The subtlety has to do with the Arabic word ‘illah, translated here as “illness” and often meaning also a “cause”. Suffice to say that the three semi-vowels central to Arabic writing are called hurūf al-‘ilal, “causal letters” or “letters of infirmity”, corresponding to the Hebrew “mothers of the reading” (imot qeri’ah/matres lectionis)—by being “weak”, like “accidents” of the consonantal fabric, they make articulation possible; they are the efficient causes of articulation.

In this particular case, the infirmity is the ever-uneasy discrepancy between solar days and the solar year (why, oh why can’t the sun return to the equinoctial point in an exact number of days!?). But through this “weakness” in the astronomical fabric, how many changes are set in motion, and how much science has developed!

Ibn Mājid’s point is a sort of poignant physico-lyrical subtlety: the order of the world is full of such little ”cracks”, “weak spots” which are as discreet doors to the forces of causality. They are happy accidents, hotspots for discovery, invention, but also turning points away from every stability, and so unhappy and sad from the point of view of the contented lovers.

As we start a new year, here is to many happy accidents of invention and discovery to our readers and colleagues. Kullu ‘am wa antum bi-khayr! [JA]