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Darrera modificació: 2008-08-02
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
King, David A., Astronomy in the Service of Islam, Aldershot, Ashgate Variorum (Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS416), 1993, 352 pp.
- Resum
- Based on a wide variety of previously unstudied sources, these articles explain how science was applied to three aspects of Islamic ritual in the Middle Ages: the regulation of the lunar calendar; the organisation of the times of the five daily prayers; and the determination of the sacred direction (qibla) towards the Kaaba in Mecca. Simple procedures of folk astronomy were used by the scholars of religious law who determined popular practice; more complicated mathematical methods were provided by the scientists – and this proved a powerful incentive for the development of scientific analysis and research. Some of these procedures were to have far-reaching consequences. For example, the astronomical alignment of the Kaaba – known to various medieval writers, but long forgotten – led to the adoption of similar alignments for the qibla, and the final articles show how these were calculated, whether from astronomical observation or geographical computation, and their impact on the orientation of religious and secular architecture across the Islamic world.
- Matèries
- Astronomia i astrologia
Arabisme
- Notes
- Conté:
I: Science in the service of religion: the case of Islam
II: Lunar Crescent Visibility and the Regulation of the Islamic Calendar: Some early Islamic tables for determining lunar crescent visibility
III: Ibn Yunus on lunar crescent visibility
IV: Lunar crescent visibility predictions in medieval Islamic ephemerides
V: Mikat: astronomical timekeeping
VI: Universal solutions in Islamic astronomy
VII: Universal solutions to problems of spherical astronomy from Mamluk Egypt and Syria
VIII: Mizwala
IX: Kibla: sacred direction
X: Makka: as the centre of the world
XI: Matla‘: astronomical rising-points
XII: On the orientation of the Ka‘ba
XIII: Astronomical alignments in medieval Islamic religious architecture
XIV: The earliest Islamic mathematical methods and tables for finding the direction of Mecca
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