Marvellous “Properties” 2: Philosophy

Now that we have concluded our reading of Ibn al-Jazzār’s Risāla fī’l-khawāss, the Epistle on Special Properties, let us see how it touches on some fundamental questions on the value of experience and experiment vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge.

The Risāla is a small work that alternates between a few theoretical paragraphs and an abundance of “examples” to justify its scientific thesis. The thesis, grosso modo, is that one should not rely on theory alone and much less on hearsay alone when considering the extraordinary natural properties and effects of some substances. Following every iteration of this line of argument, Ibn al-Jazzār provides us with a wealth of examples to make his point, citing an impressive roster of traditional authorities. Here is a sample,

According to al-Tabarī, when the tongue of a hoopoe is hung above someone who is forgetful, he will recover his memories. // They say that when you take a fang from the upper left jaw of a crocodile, and hang it above someone afflicted by fever, his fever will go away.

Help yourself to materia medica!

Naturally, during our reading we had many occasions for good cheer with the sometimes outrageous and often bewildering examples, commenting on how we should make sure to acquire this or that particularly helpful substance, like body parts of tortoises or lions. But beyond the banter, two points are worth reflecting on: 1) the vanity of rational understanding in the face of the marvellous, and 2) the unquestionable value of experience when reported from trustworthy authorities.

Ibn al-Jazzār goes almost as far as ridiculing the attempt at rationalising the wondrous properties of nature, making a perennially valid epistemological point: how can you claim that something is impossible or absurd, and not simply a reflection of shortcomings in your perception and understanding? This attitude is precisely the acknowledgement of and openness to “anomalies” that, in Kuhn’s language, may give way to needed new paradigms.

The second point follows: you have to stubbornly trust your own experience of the phenomena or, if not your very own (and here comes the twist), the experience of fully trustworthy authorities. That is, the chain of authorities is not hearsay and not mere bibliography, it is as if we ourselves had seen the fever abate under the crocodile's fang, and memories return under the hoopoe’s tongue. I may not have been there and made these experiences with crazy substances, but I trust Aristotle, and Galen, and Apollonius etc.

As ever, we find here how directly our very modern and cutting-edge questions are in conversation with medieval authors, and how from subjects like magic, alchemy and all that “crass baseless superstition” we are questioned, and indeed assayed and improved in our theory and our practice. Ergo, if you have some Arabic, don’t hesitate and join our weekly reading group, restarting in September. [J. Acevedo]

Marvellous “Properties” 1: Authorities

After completing our reading of Sirafī’s True Stories of the Seas and their Marvels, we have started work on the 10th-century Epistle on the Special Properties (Risāla fī'l-khawāss) of Ahmad ibn al-Jazzār. The word khawāss here refers to the special properties, often magical or wondrous, of certain substances and beings, like the magnet, a first-time mother’s milk, or the “royal snake” (i.e. the basilisk). These entities informed an abundant literature on alchemy and magic, and were readily incorporated into more “scientific” treatises, especially medicinal, like herbals and lapidaries. As our reading continues, it becomes increasingly apparent that in spite of the work’s title, we are not far at all from the topic of mirabilia/‘ajā’ib, the wonders of creation. In fact, this text is the main source of Albertus Magnus’ De mirabilibus mundi.

As the reader can imagine, treatises on magical properties can be great fun. We learn about stones that can attract any kind of substance, the usefulness of carrying around a little bit of human bone, or how to avoid being killed by the gaze of the basilisk, to say nothing of natural contraceptive methods like drinking mule’s urine. But apart from such eminently practical content, these first pages have made me reflect on two aspects worth commenting on: the chain of authorities, and the philosophical stance of the author.

Hippocrates (4th c. BC), Galen (3rd c. AD) and Avicenna (11th c. AD)
having a proper learned chat.

The authorities from whom the reports of marvellous properties proceed make a formidable roster, and are a sort of Who Is Who of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. They include first of all Aristoteles, then of course Galen, the ubiquitous Alexander (the Great, often identified with the Quranic Dhu’l-Qarnayn), Cleopatra, Arab luminaries such as Ibn Masawayh, and “Byzantine” scholars such as Qusta ibn Luqa. What is most remarkable about this fascinating list —an advanced educational syllabus in itself, for whomever is curious— is how easily and stably it moved across languages, cultures and textual genres over the centuries. Never mind that you were reading about navigation, medicine, alchemy or astronomy, you would just as easily come across the same authorities.

The enterprise of science is always necessarily alternating through time between its conservative and revolutionary tendencies: tradition versus innovation, respect for the past versus embrace of the novel—this is the way (of knowledge), because it would be absurd not to capitalise on the achievements of our predecessors. Now this term, “respect”, means originally not only to “look back to”, or “to look again”, but also, due to the intensive function of the prefix re-, “to look very intently at something”. One could say that the respectful study of the traditional authorities has to include all these nuances: to go back again and again to the same authors, and also to look at them with patience and persistence, not sparing efforts to understand their ideas, and struggling with them in the pursuit of knowledge. This is how we try to work in our weekly reading groups, ever hoping to engage in the timeless Geistergespräch, the conversation of minds through the ages.*

As for the second aspect, the philosophical stance of Ibn al-Jazzar and how it relates to contemporary science and our daily research, well… I'm afraid it may have to wait until our next post. Stay tuned! [J. Acevedo]

* You are welcome to join us, it's free.

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]

Online Workshop: “Sailing the Early Modern Indian Ocean”

An international workshop to approach from various perspectives the generation, constitution and circulation of nautical-related knowledge throughout the Indian Ocean World, following the late medieval and early modern trade routes.

Join us on the 24 and 25 January to share “case studies”, problems, or curiosities in a collegial setting, benefitting from the expertise, insights and help of interested colleagues. And please spread the word among those who may be interested.

And here is the program, To register, please email juan.acevedo@fc.ul.pt

Knowledge Weaponized

Towards the end of chapter 6 of his Fawā’id, after going over the complexities of various kinds of routes and course-plotting options, Ibn Mājid explains:

I have made distinctions (farraqtu), because the different skills (‘ulūm, “sciences”) are like weapons: sometimes you need a bow and sometimes a sword, sometimes a spear and sometimes an ax or a dagger, and yet, for all this, you may never be dispensed of using a knife.

The explicit point seems to be that every skill, as a subdiscipline of knowledge, has its own irreplaceable and particular application, and that it is necessary to have a rounded preparation, because, as he puts it later, borrowing a saying from Imam ‘Ali: “man is the enemy of anything he is ignorant of,” or rather, given the context, “man is at war with everything he is ignorant of” (al-insān ‘aduww mā jahilahu). That is (and we must put it in the context of piloting a ship through the ocean and having to land safely thousands of miles away), everything we ignore is a hostile prompt to catastrophic failure. And the obvious way to be prepared, or armed, is to acquire the panoply of knowledge required by our respective field.

The bodhisattva Kuan Yin, armed against ignorance (Wellcome Collection).

The implicit point is in that initial “making distinctions”, associated to terms like farq, “distinction, discrimination, severance”, and furqān, an epithet of the Qur’an meaning “a criterion”. As it happens, this root-meaning of division and discernment is exactly the same of the English-Germanic skill, and also of Latin scientia. The suggestion that science and skill have a common origin in discernment/dissection should give us pause now, as it would be better developed in another post.

So now, instead, going back to the image of waging war against ignorance, we can see how the mighty ancient saying is so much better when applied in science than in politics: Divide et impera! or in Arabic, Farriq tasud!, discern and you shall rule. [JA]

Arab Tridua: Three-Day “Weeks” in Arabia

This post is about a rather neglected aspect of time division in early Arabia. In his Fawā’id (IV, 7) Ibn Mājid explains: “Every month is divided in ten parts of three days each, and each part has its name.” Then he lists the ten triads or, more specifically, tridua: Ghurar, Nufal, Tusa‘, ‘Ushar, Buhr, Bīd, Durā‘, Muhāq, Hanādis, Ziyād, Surar. Most of the names are straightforward in meaning, relating to the appearance of the moon or to the date count, and the word “three” is implicit. For example, “The three of Tusa‘” (al-thalāth al-tusa‘) means something like “the three [days] of the ninth”, because this triad ends on the ninth day of the lunar month. Al-thalāth al-bīd means “the three of whiteness”, because they are near the full moon.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that the above list actually contains eleven tridua, not just ten. This means to reflect the garbled textual condition in which Ibn Mājid’s list reached his readers in the 15th century, with obvious ingrained misspellings and interpolations. The earlier references I can find for these names are Ibn Wādih al-Ya‘qūbī (9th century) and al-Bīrūnī (11th century), who give slightly different lists. In comparison to them, Ibn Mājid’s does look like the outcome of centuries of Chinese whispers.

Now, al-Bīrūnī explains first that the names are derived “from the distinctness revealed by the state and the curvature of the moon,” and shortly after that they are “taken from the faces of the moon and its curvature.” This is what I find warrants a thought on our concept of “week”. Our weeks derive in part from a division of the lunar cycle in quarters.

Let us leave aside for now the numerological relevance of the division in three, seven or ten, which we have discussed previously. We can see how the beautiful continuum of the lunation allows for as many divisions as our powers of observation allow us to determine distinct—hence nameable—units. How many nights do we need to appreciate each clearly distinct aspect of the moon?

Nama-rupa, in the Sanskrit philosophical terminology, “name-form”: mutually dependent and inseparable aspects of every phenomenon, everything that appears to then vanish “under the Sun.” The gentle and ever-so-fleeting light of the moon is perhaps the phenomenon par excellence, now there, now vanished… What is left to us, puny sublunary creatures is to wield our power to name, and thus, by naming, to create scientia, the knowability and the knowledge, a “possession for ever.” [JA]

The Spacetime of Early Modern Navigation

As we continue to read chapter 4 of the Fawā’id, about the nautical rhumbs, and as we go through detailed descriptions of time and distance measurements, we come across technical concepts which in their practicalities bring us, once again, to reflect on some of the principles of our modern technoscience.

The distance unit in early modern Arab navigation was the zām (pl. azwām). The technical concept is the taraffā or tirfa, called by early Portuguese explorers the “Rule of the Leagues” (regimento das leguas), the function between the distance travelled, the latitude progress, and the azimuth of the destination: e.g. if you travel straight up north, it takes you one hour to shift your position by one degree northwards, but if you travel towards the north-east, it will take you longer to advance that same degree northwards. A nice image of this concept is given by the triangle below, where A is the point of origin, and the latitude difference between A and B would be one degree. Simply put: the AB diagonal path takes longer to reach the same parallel.

Now, how to measure the advance without any points of reference on the flat surface of the ocean? The key point is: time is a function of movement. Something has to move for there to be a sign of time, because, as ordinary language teaches us: “time passes”, and we speak about “a space” or “an extension” of time, and we ask “how long?” as if we were speaking of a stretch of a road or a piece of string.

The solution: look up from the surface of the ocean and into the sky, where the positions and the continuous movement of the heavenly bodies show us directions and show us time. This relation between movement and time brings to mind Plato’s formulation: “time is the moving image of eternity” (Timaeus 37d). A sundial illustrates this too, being somehow “a moving shadow of eternity”. The passing stars were the necessary reference, and so, one of the definitions of zām reads, “the distance it takes to raise the Pole Star by one eighth of a finger if the ship sails due north”.

Sundial, courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan.

Fundamental coexistence of space and time, and strikingly obvious continuity of their dimensions… What to make, in this light, of the complexities of the space-time formalism of contemporary physics, with their illustrious history and mathematical refinements? Is this yet another case of “nothing new under the sun”? The word itself, spacetime, goes perfectly well with the medieval perception of navigators—the consubstantiality of space and time was immediately obvious. Perhaps it is just a matter of continuing to deepen the dialogue, the centuries-old conversation between the depths of metaphysical speculation and the frontlines of physical enquiry. Time will tell. [JA]

Ostriches? What Ostriches!?

The early Arabic sky has some ostriches running through it: one of the lunar stations of early Bedouin astronomy is called The Ostriches (al-Na‘ā’im), and two of the brightest stars in the sky, Fomalhaut (α PisA) and Hadar (β Centauri), are also called “ostriches”, zilmān. We have been reading about these ostriches for long months now and, busy with astronomical and nautical details, we missed the question obvious to any contemporary reader: what ostriches in Arabia?

It is a historically well-known fact that we humans, as cultural and mythical beings, always project on the night sky our lives, including both what surrounds us everyday and what informs our minds. This is how the Greeks had the Ship Argo and their deities and fabled animals above, while in Patagonia they had rheas in the sky, and in Australia emus. Of course, you could say that if the Greeks had a winged horse, the Arab bedouins could very well have had their ostriches and an ice cream cart too, but… is there something missing?

An old picture, and an ancient mosaic from Petra.

As it turns out—and this is the beauty of how uranography and astronomy intertwine with very down-to-earth disciplines across the natural sciences—there were ostriches in Asia Minor and Arabia, but they were hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century. The Arabian ostrich (Struthio camelus syriacus) was very close genetically to its North-African cousins, and it had an important place in the culture of the Middle East since prehistoric times, but alas, it could not survive the arrival of firearms and motor vehicles.

While they remain undisturbed in the night sky, though, they help us on several fronts. They bring to mind the frailty of life on this sublunar place, and they can make us wonder at how we relate to the configuration of the night sky: while we obviously project parts of our lives on those glittering lights, what do we receive from them? What is the quid pro quo we have with the stars? What does their “life” project on earth? As readers of this blog will remember, there are very early and strong arguments to say that every systematic, controlled, “mathematical” way of pursuing knowledge here below derives from the observation of those ostriches and their celestial companions. There seems to be, in a very strict etymological sense, a dialogue between the stars and men: logos going through between high and low and low and high, for the advancement of science. [JA]

If You Are Patient…

Speaking of celestial rhumbs, Ibn Mājid is constantly going back to fine points of astronomical observations, how one star is “fettered” to another and how each one pertains to a rich interplay of positions. “Look at it when it is rising, then what is at the zenith and four fingers to the north at the same level. Then look at it when it is culminating, and check what is level with it and what is setting and rising at the same time…” and so on and so forth to a point of baffling complexity. It was the business of the pilots, who watched through the night and recognised the different configurations, as is encapsulated in the following advice:

If you persevere from its rising to its setting, from the beginning to the end of the night, you will see how all the configurations of its altitude measurements take shape through the sky.

Shapes seen in the sky by more than thirty different civilizations.
Design by Eleanor Lutz.

We had had occasion to comment on this “figurative” view of the stars, including its artisanal aspects and some of its more abstract associations. What is peculiar here is the emphasis on the prolonged observation to get “the full picture”, the direct relation between the tenacity of the practitioner and the access to the whole of the material, as it where.

In a few words we get a vivid and timeless picture of the Indian Ocean pilot’s discipline: watching through the night, patiently, registering the manyfold complexity that made wayfinding possible. I wonder to what extent this applies to the proficiency in other arts and techniques: the relentless attention, watching while everyone else sleeps, absorbing those guiding, principial forms—in the end, this is as good an image as it gets of what “in-formation“ used to mean; not just being exposed to data, but imbibing knowledge through the night with diligent eyes, to find a way. [JA]

Black and White Waters at Sea

One of the abiding question marks as we study the Indian Ocean nautical texts is that practically all their wayfinding lore, all their sophisticated, awe-inspiring system of astronavigation depends on darkness—specifically on the absence of daylight. No wonder that one of the recurrent pieces of advice of Ibn Mājid to aspiring pilots is that “they shall sleep very little at night.” It is as if the astronomical skill of the pilots required them to live by night, because it was by night, in darkness, that they found their guidance and their certainty. One wonders at some reports in European nautical literature, about pilots who habitually slept by day to be awake at night.

Drawing clarity from darkness and coming to life in the dead of night are motives of inversion which are common to other nocturnal professions; they speak of an inversion of normality related to a special kind of knowledge. Noblesse oblige, in the case of the pilots, meant that they could no longer live like ordinary sailors.

Another remarkable inversion of values at sea is the appreciation of black waters mentioned in the Fawā’id. Black waters do not mean stormy weather or anything ominous, but are foam-less waters, while white waters are choppy waters, when it is windy and small peaks of foam take shape on the surface of the sea. Black smooth water means stability, calm winds, and above all, an even ride for the observation of the sky and for better calibrated measures.

In what is a typical experience of reversal (taqallub) as one advances through the degrees of knowledge, down the rabbit-hole, or through the looking-glass, or coming out of the cave of ordinary life, the Arab pilots (the ma‘ālimah, “those who know and teach”), seem to have led lives of subtly shifted values. The night and dark which inspire fear and misgivings to ordinary mortals, and which give shelter to crime and transgression, was their element and was for them a time of discernment and attainment. [JA]

Canopus: Gentle Celestial Key

Known in Arabic as Suhayl, Canopus is the second-brightest star in the night sky, second only to Sirius, and it has a cultural importance which it would be hard to exaggerate. In Islamic civilisation in particular, it is notable because the major axis of the Kaaba is aligned with its rising point.

As we read on through the nautical rhumbs, Suhayl has a prominent place, forming part of a diametrical pair which is closest to the poles. Suhayl would be practically a South Pole indicator, while its complementary opposites (al-Na‘sh, the Plough) would be North Pole indicators. Ibn Mājid explains: “Young and old among the people of the desert and the people of the sea, everyone knows Suhayl by sight.” And he adds: “Nothing is better than Suhayl to take altitude measures among what has been set in motion by the Turner of the Spheres (Tornator Caelorum, al-Dawwār). Southern peoples use it to unlock the routes to all of India and Arabia.”

Finding the South Pole,
approx. below the word “Cross” in the image,
between Canopus, Achernar and the Cross.

It is remarkable that the name Suhayl, a star of such mighty practical importance, should mean literally “the little easy-going one”. As a diminutive of sahl, it has a range of related meanings, all familiar names of gentleness. As we had seen with the Pleiades (Thurayyā, Soraya, Zorayda?), Suhayl has also the discreet yet pervasive distinction of being used as a personal given name; it is a common male name not only in Arabic, but in Urdu, Persian and Turkish as well.

This archaic, indeed pre-Islamic, custom of using star names for children makes you wonder about similar practices across cultures. Apart from Spanish Sol and Luna, Sun and Moon, which are used as girls’ names (in Arabic, Shams is for men while Qamar is for women), I can only recall literary characters like Lyra Belacqua (His Dark Materials) and Sirius Black and his family of Harry Potter’s characters. I wonder if our readers can tell us about other people named after celestial bodies? Not sure Arthur would count… Any Betelgeuses or Achernars you are acquainted with!? [JA]

The Greeting Stars

When speaking of “stellar navigation”, “celestial navigation”, or “astronavigation”, the implicit understanding is that of a sophisticated observational system. Long nights, repetitive activities, meticulous recording and so on. But Ibn Majid tries to shows us a different aspect of the relation between the pilot and the stars when he says: “It would be fair to use the following image to speak about me,

The radiance of the stars became so fond of me
That they would ask about me whenever I went out of sight.
When arriving they would say hello to me,
And when departing they would wave goodbye.”

Joniton, fourth son of Noah, the First Astronomer
(World Chronicle, 15th c., J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 33, fol. 12)

Can we derive any lesson from such a poetic utterance, to further our understanding of early modern technoscience? Perhaps only this, which we had already touched upon when discussing embodied knowledge: the relation between the expert “artist” (harking back to the technical sense of Latin ars) is multilayered and multifaceted, and hard to fathom. It seems clear enough, in any case, that unwavering attention to an object of knowledge, even something as inconceivably distant and alien as the stars—they who know neither joy nor pain of birth and death—brings about an epistemological shift. The cold object is no longer that cold, the relation not so distant… suddenly, one day, that distant star may wink at you.

This is not quite unrelated to the observer effect in physics, playing out in subtle overtones which were accounted for in medieval science but are fundamentally dismissed nowadays. Somewhere between the detached and practical stargazing, and the loving company of the celestial bodies, a different kind of “objectivity” arises. The cosmos is no longer altogether distinct from the observer, but a “wondrous cosmos” in which “all observers, from the farmer to the astronomer to the monk, had something to learn from watching the sky.” [JA]

Signs on the Horizons

One of the best known Qur’anic verses related to navigation is 41:35, “We shall show them Our signs upon the horizons and within themselves, until it be clear to them that He is the Real” (the change of grammatical person: “Our signs"/“He is”, is a typical Qur’anic figure (iltifāt), as if emphasizing that the “person” is always the One and Only).

As we have seen in recent posts, and as is made obvious in the design of the wind rose, the nautical rhumbs establish a direct relation between the central subject, i.e. the pilot or the vessel itself, and the peripheral object deployed in 360 degrees of possibility, divided in a conventional number of directions, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. Seen on the two-dimensional pattern, as seen from a stationary position, the horizon is the utmost limit, the non plus ultra. The natural state of the landlubber is this beyond-less confinement, where the signs on the horizon are informative, recreational, interesting, even fascinating.

But there are the travellers, those who move on. And there are the astronomers, the true astrologers who have intimate knowledge of the movement of the cosmos, of the law of movement, whereby mighty lights rise from the horizon, run their course, and set, inexorably.

For such pilots and knowers of the spheres, the signs are an existential reality, a living knowledge: “beyond” and “self” merged, the horizons are not a limit, but a stage of the journey—onward they sail, guided without error by the stars whose love is in their heart. For them, in their journey Home, the horizons from within themselves reverberate encircling one another, circle upon circle upon circle… [JA]