Veritas Filia Temporis

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Veritas filia temporis.

(Aulus Gellius, c. 130-180, Rome?)

Sonja Brentjes

London

Truth is a capricious lady, but is she indeed a daughter of time and if so in which sense?

Perhaps she is rather an Ibn al-waqt than the true friend of a scientist, let alone a historian?

It was long believed that some scientific disciplines such as geometry or logic yielded certain

knowledge, that is true and reliable knowledge, while others such as physics or astrology were

considered with suspicion and as potentially dangerous and misleading. While physics

ascended into the class of sciences that deliver truth under certain conditions, astrology

descended into the group of so-called pseudo-sciences. Their epistemological status, however,

does not directly impinge upon their efficacy, reputation, and acceptance among different

social, cultural, and religious groups. While several technical aspects of what physics

achieved since the nineteenth century such as light bulbs, semiconductors, and computer chips

penetrate the daily life of millions of women, men, and children, the high amount of difficult

theory and mathematical apparatus has not endeared this discipline to generations of students

except for the brightest ones. Physics reputation experienced profound up and downs in its

history since it was transformed into a science based on mathematics in the seventeenth

century. In the last century, it suffered at least two major blows, one caused by

epistemological, methodological, political, and ideological reasons, the other resulted from

the discovery of nuclear fission and its subsequent application to war and power stations.

Physics way through time is thus not a straight path of progress towards success. Astrology,

on the other hand, occupies a profoundly different space in society, both in the East and the

West, if you allow me this simplification. It does not receive state funding. It is not taught in

schools or at universities. Its professionals do not receive awards. But all supermarkets,

newspaper boots, bookstores, and jewellery shops sell astrological items - books on astrology

and its history, daily horoscopes, journals exclusively devoted to the field, zodiacal signs, and

instructions how to practice the art. The Internet features astrological sites. The telephone

book informs about practitioners. Advertisements invite potential customers to get counselling

by experts and to buy talismans. Astrology in the West is a commercial success, although few

people know how it works and believe at best some of the most elementary pronouncements

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about the connection of their birthday and the position of the zodiacal sign. Truth is evidently

not a major factor for the disciplines recent fortunes. Astrologys way through time was not a

straight path of decline into oblivion.

What then does Aulus Gellius maxim teaches us for the relevance of truth to history, the

historical profession, and the public use of historys machinations and their interpretations by

historians?

Gellius maxim was interpreted differently already since its formulation. Some readers of his

notebook Noctes Atticae, the Athenian Nights, understood it to mean that Time leads

Truth to light. In this perspective, the professional historian can sit back and wait. Truth is

nothing of his doing. It comes out if not by itself then by the hidden working of the divine

Kronos. One professional approach to history that, at the first glance, seems to fit best to this

understanding of Gellius maxim is German historicism founded by Leopold von Ranke

(1795-1886). In his first book, which led in 1825 to his appointment as professor for history at

the newly founded Humboldt University in Berlin, he declared boldly that a historian is not a

judge and the past does not stand in front of the bench. Rather, he as a historian merely

wanted to show how things had truly been. Rankes concept of professional history was

directed against the epistemological interests of the enlightenment that aimed at explaining

the present and changing it to the better. The core method Ranke developed in his project is

that of Quellenkritik, the critical testing of historical sources as to what their claim to truth

was and which interests had motivated their specific form and content. The method of

Quellenkritik elevated professional history in the eyes of Rankes contemporaries to the status

of a science, an objective investigation of historical truth. Thus, at a second glance,

historicism is not content with waiting for the dictum of Time. Against its claim of merely

reconstructing what had truly been, Rankes historicism aims at discovering not simple

historical truth, but Truth identified as the Idea of World History. Ranke was Kronos. He

was, however, not a divine Kronos who knew the historical universals and deduced from them

the particulars of human history. His was a seemingly empirical stance proudly declaring:

From the particular you can ascend cautiously and courageously to the universal. But there is

no way from general theory to the perception of the particular. But again, the principle of

individuality, inspired by romanticism and its related value relativism, betrays the inattentive

consumer of Rankes Truth. Individuality was not limited to the realm of methodology. It was

the true goal of all cognition. Cognition itself aimed at the higher plane. It was not to be

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the seventeenth century, post-Cromwellian English science is seen today as defining itself

through anti-Cromwellian social and cultural aspirations rather than simply through

objectivity or scientific truth. The postmodernist historian of science refuses to be Kronos.

She pretends to adhere to liberal pluralism, to subscribe to the freedom of the individual, and

to destroy the elites exclusive access to science and history. Her core belief, however, is a

polished version of Francis Bacons dictum Knowledge is Power. All acts of knowing aim

at gaining, preserving, and defending power in all its varieties whether personal, communal,

royal, political, or cultural. Power is the first and the last word of postmodernist understanding

of history and knowledge. In a postmodernist account, physics and astrology do not differ

primarily in respect to their truth claim or the status of the evidence they deliver, but through

their capability to establish power over nature and the fellow-human. In his paper We never

were modern, the anthropologist Bruno Latour portrays postmodernist power as the

capability of defining what nature is, of creating nature that does not exist, and of merging the

social and natural to a point that they loose their individuality and distinction. Science, in this

view, is either the product of a demiurg who betrays himself by believing in a theory-guided

questioning, probing, and interpreting of objective, independent nature and hence destroys it

by replacing it by one of his own making. Or it is the product of a team that inhabits a

computerized lab, pushes buttons, drowns in long series of coded data, reduces nature to

invisible, untouchable elementary particles, and pretends to search for human salvation, while

trying to commercialise its expertise to the highest possible degree for the labs leader. Both

portraits share the emphasis on science as a kind of knowledge production that destroys its

own base nature - and its main rhetorical value - the betterment of the human lot - by the

particularities of its very own hierarchical, interventionist, and prejudiced practices and

beliefs. Thus, while the postmodernist historian is no Kronos, he is the temporal arbiter, the

only qualified expert for explaining and interpreting what scientists do and why they believe

they are doing something else.

Between historicism and postmodernism, contemporary historians of science work with

manifold other theoretical and methodological concepts and tools. Some may say that my

comparison of historicism and postmodernism with the two major interpretations of Aulus

Gellius maxim that historical actors of the past have come up with is too radical, too

unbalanced. The culture of consensus, while seldom practiced either in the sciences or in the

humanities, continues to act as a powerful rhetorical yardstick within the academic

community. It tells us that truth is not yet a poor emigrant from academic life. Neither are

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values such as honesty, fairness, or correctness and technical competence completely banned.

The culture of criticism, itself a major component of the culture of consensus, silently

reinforces time and again the belief in a sharable truth, in something that is negotiable, that

can enable communication across borderlines, or that can at least be talked about, listened too,

read, criticized, reformed, or dismissed as hopeless. These rhetorical beliefs safeguard under

certain conditions that communication takes place either between separate disciplinary camps

or within one such camp that in itself is rarely rigidly construed, but rather consists of

undercurrents, variations, and counter-currents. One of the conditions that need to be fulfilled

for acts of communication is a critical mass of researchers. If the number of researchers is too

small such as in history of science or history of philosophy in Islamic societies,

communication is severely reduced by the individualization of research agendas. Researchers

can only communicate if they dispose of a minimum of shared knowledge, experience,

questions, sources, and language skills, not to talk about standards, norms, and values.

Currently, this is not the case in history of science and philosophy in Islamic societies. Hence,

several, profoundly hostile groups have emerged over the last three or four decades that either

do not communicate at all or merely pretend to adhere to some kind of academic civility.

Another condition that needs to be fulfilled is the belief that communication is possible nd

desirable. While radical postmodernists deny categorically that communication between

different cultures is possible, independent of what kind of cultures we may talk about,

historians of science and philosophy in Islamic societies of a more traditional brand form two

large groups. All those who believe that some sort of communication is possible form the first

group. The second group has practically abandoned the standard rhetorical belief that a

researcher has to take into consideration all professional views on a certain subject matter,

treat them fairly according to their scholarly merits, and offer his own results in a form that

allows his colleagues in principle to check and weigh them.

The actual amount of what is communicable and negotiable, if scholars subscribe to the

culture of consensus or at least to the culture of critique, depends on their disciplinary

identities, their professional expertise, the values that determine the perception of what is

important and what can be ignored, and individual idiosyncracies. Views are open to

discussion when they are placed within the space of rational, falsifiable knowledge and when

their proponents think of truth as written with a small t and depending on a temporally and

locally defined human society. If scholars uphold such a reading of Aulus Gellius maxim

they will exercise to some degree respect and occasionally even tolerance to other, including

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conflicting views. Dimitri Gutas repeatedly expressed his deep conviction that concepts such

scientific objectivity and standards such as reproducibility are the basis upon which each

historical project needs to build. Hence, he insists on Quellenkritik and opposes the blurring

of boundaries. He maintains that a history of philosophy and science cannot stop with critical

editions and the elucidation of the technical content of a text. The duty of a historian of

philosophy and science goes further. It consists in situating the two domains of human

intellectual activity in their proper societies. Gutas position does not necessarily mean that

the only way to historical truth is the study of the local micro-cosmos of a philosopher and his

works. Gutas is more interested in uncovering social, economic, and political interests and

changes on a macro-level that made a new philosophical or scientific development possible.

King favours the classical tasks of a historian of science, namely finding, editing, translating,

and explaining astronomical texts, tables, and instruments, but he aims at doing this through

consciously including the environment in which the authors of his historical objects lived. He

sees himself primarily as an Islamicist, that is as a student of Islamic culture. Hence, he is

interested in topics such as scientific practice, science in the service of Islam, sacred

geography, and regional particularities. But his approach to context is more limited than his

interest in content. In terms of values, content outranks context. He rejects the notion that

historical truth is subject to a kind of Heisenbergian condition of haziness and that content and

context are relative terms that depend on each other. Sabra as a student of Carl Popper favours

the study of ideas and their histories. As a result, his concept of context is a broadly construed

intellectual realm that includes all ideas that potentially contributed to the formation of the

scientific ideas he is studying. Hence, he encouraged students to study together with scientific

authors works by mutakallimun. He himself studies the relationship between the ancient

sciences and kalam on several levels. He is interested in exchanges between scholars of

different disciplinary and methodological orientation in Islamic societies. He seeks to

understand the fate of what he believes was the Islamic form of Hellenism within Islamic

culture at large and to grapple with what traditionally is called the decline of the ancient

sciences in this culture. Sabras interests in the history of ideas in the context of Islamic

culture enabled him to challenge and abandon in some respect the solidly set judgments about

the ancient sciences in Islamic societies. He rejected the notion of marginalized ancient

sciences and proposed to look at all scientific projects in Islamic culture as self-determined

activities by their authors rather than as considering scientists in Islamic culture as passive

recipients and safe-guards of ancient Greek knowledge. Ragep is interested in the history of

astronomy, in particular planetary theories, in Islamic societies as a historian, not as a

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scientist. He sees identifying, editing, translating, and commenting upon Arabic or Persian

texts as important tasks to which he currently contributes together with Sally Ragep with the

major project of an Internet interactive database. But he considers them as starting points

rather than endpoints. His focus is similar to that of Sabra on a history of ideas and major

theoretical concepts and on an approach to Islamic scientific culture that links it critically with

ancient Greek and Hellenistic astronomy on the one hand and astronomy in Catholic and later

Protestant Europe on the other hand. In his perspective, context and content determine each

other as long as their linkages can be investigated and interpreted by rational arguments and

methods. Rageps insistence on rationality resembles Gutas defence of objectivity and

reproducibility. The three concepts are however not identical. Ragep is more inclined to

accept that all concepts and values that structure our research are historically formed and do

not exist always and everywhere. As a result, his approach to historical truth while erecting

clear boundaries is more open to negotiation than that of Gutas. As these few examples for the

first group illustrate, the research projects of these scholars are profoundly different and not

all what they think, believe in, and do is negotiable. But there is a substantial amount of

research practice where these scholars are in principal agreement with each other and hence

are willing and capable to communicate their findings and judgments.

The break down of communication between the first and the second group is caused by three

factors a belief in hidden, esoteric meanings of philosophical and scientific texts not shared

by members of the first group, a rejection of objectivity, reproducibility, and to some extent

even rationality by members of the second group, and a continuous, intentional violation of

moral and behavioural standards of academic life by some members of the second group.

Muhdi Mahsin, Charles Butterworth, and others accept the Straussian concept that all

philosophy in Islamic societies is political philosophy and that no Islamic philosopher ever

wrote what he was convinced was the truth. They implicitly assume that the truth lays in the

esoteric meaning of the old texts and that they are called and capable to decode this hidden

meaning. John Walbridge is convinced that Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi was at heart a

member of a largely construed Platonist and Pythagorean camp of philosophy. He feels it

possible to dispense with Quellenkritik, since he believes in two contradictory tenets

historical contingency according to which nothing in history follows by law, regularity, or

transcendent purpose and the existence of transcending types of philosophical doctrine that

are rethought by subsequent thinkers separated by space and time without a textual affiliation

that unites their ideas. Seyyed Hossein Nasr propagates an approach to history of philosophy

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and science in Islamic societies that emphasises the Islamic character of the two fields of

knowledge. The reason for this focus is Nasrs religious belief and his conviction that modern

Western science is destructive because it has lost its metaphysical foundation. This conviction

led Nasr to engage philosophically and politically in a struggle to islamicize modern sciences.

An aspect of this struggle is his professional preference for the study of specific forms of

thinking about nature, the universe, and God in Islamic societies such as ishraq and irfan. As

a nationalist, Nasr singles out authors of Iranian origin. The closure of debate is reached when

he stops to subject claims about historical events, products, methods, or beliefs to a critical

analysis on the basis of sources open to every other historian interested in Nasrs thesis. An

example in case is Nasrs doctrine that Islamic philosophy, like everything else Islamic, is

deeply rooted in the Quran and Hadith. Islamic philosophy is Islamic not only by virtue of

the fact that it was cultivated in the Islamic world and by Muslims, but because it derives

from the sources of Islamic revelation despite the claims of its opponents to the contrary.

The result of his belief that all knowledge produced in Islamic societies is rooted in the

scriptures is his reduction of Islamic philosophy to prophetic philosophy. Prophetic

philosophy considers revelation superior to philosophy. In this perspective, the greatest

contribution of Islamic writers to philosophy was their analysis of the relation between

religion and philosophy. Like the Straussians, Nasr detects the Islamic essence of this

philosophy by an act of unveiling. The analysis of the technical vocabulary, the ideas, the

arguments, the illustrations, and the proofs does not suffice to understand the profound

difference between Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy. Truth for Nasr is not the daughter of

time, but the Lord and the son of revelation. It is to the Haqiqah that one has to turn for the

inspiration and source of knowledge for Islamic philosophy. Much of Islamic philosophy

is in fact a hermeneutic unveiling of the two grand books of revelation, the Quran and the

cosmos, and in the Islamic intellectual universe, Islamic philosophy belongs, despite some

differences, to the same family as that of marifah or gnosis which issues directly from the

inner teachings of Islam and which became crystallized in both Sufism and certain dimensions

of Shiism. Roshdi Rashed has an entirely different concept of history and truth. Religious

beliefs play no role whatsoever in his conceptual and methodological approach to the history

of science in Islamic societies. He not only does not care about differences between societies

and cultures in the Islamic world, he denies that ethnic origin, maternal language, or any other

cultural factor that shapes identity have a role to play in his story. He favours genius, novelty,

and difficulty as the most important and extra-cultural criteria with which scientific works

should be compared and measured. His history goes incessantly from ancient Greece to

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seventeenth-century France. The role of scientific discoveries and inventions made by

scholars in Islamic societies in this chain of history is that of revolutionizing ancient Greek

theories and methods and anticipating modern Western mathematics and optics. His tool is the

transformation of concepts, ideas, methods, results, languages, and images formulated, written

down, and checked between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries in Baghdad, Shiraz, Cairo,

or Maragha into symbols, formulas, and concepts of twentieth-century French mathematics.

Truth is for Rashed not a daughter of time, but a mathematical function. He is a living

embodiment of radical postmodernist theories. His struggle for power in the academic world

of Paris induced him to break major moral standards of academic conduct. He instigated two

unfounded accusations of plagiarism. His students publish as new studies what mature

colleagues have already investigated and published. He himself does the same, accusing the

authors of the respective first editions, translations, and comments of substantial mistakes in

all three parts of their works. As Hogendijk has proven for both cases, Rashed copied silently

the work of his predecessors.

My own reading of Aulus Gellius maxim is that truth is not even an Ibn al-waqt. She is rather

an elusive lady who beckons with a sweet smile, but tends to fade away like sound and

smoke. Hard work is the coin that she demands. But she never promises that even after all her

rules have been followed and all tools have been properly applied she will surface like

Aphrodite from the sea. She can be twisted in a myriad of ways, but does she truly exist and if

she does is she one or many or both? And what is her relation to time? Is time a metaphor for

Zeitgeist or for the universe? My life experience as a scholar and as a person tells me that all

of these aspects are needed for a fruitful and humane approach to historical truth. I despise the

way in which historical truth is bent to satisfy narrow political interests as done, for instance,

by G.W. Bush when comparing D-day with his invasion in Iraq. I regret her getting twisted

for the purpose of forging national, ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological, or political

identities as done, for instance, during the official celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of D-

day which was lauded as marking the turning point and the end of World War II. I get

exasperated with her impoverished figure in many TV shows, not to talk about Hollywood or

Bollywood. I think she exists in the material sources that our ancestors created and in their

oral traditions. I am convinced that we can profit for our own lives when we approach her

modestly, but courageously, disbelieving the all-to-easy success or the apparently obvious. I

have learned from my historical studies that it is necessary to accept norms, beliefs, purposes,

modes of thinking, customs, and practices that are not mine, who I may reject for my own life.

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If I dont try this seriously and with all consequence, I may rather produce a reflection of

myself, than decipher the past. I also learned from my historical studies, that our ancestors

were intelligent, loveable women and men most of them with whom I can communicate

thanks to their works. When I got my diploma after four years of being a math undergraduate,

I thought that there was nothing more to do. Mathematics was taught to me as if it were a

closed system. After three years of reading books on past mathematics as a history of science

graduate student, I was convinced that my professors had missed the truth. Mathematics was

not a closed, finished, dead science. Studying history of science in Islamic and other societies

has opened my eyes and enriched my life. Through history I have experienced human cultures

and societies as open-ended and manifold, as changing and changeable. Through history of

science, I have learned that everything in human civilization is historical, has at least one,

often more histories, even superstition, objectivity, fact, nature, or the divine. If this were all

that Aulus Gellius truth offers, hers is a very precious gift indeed.

Let me illustrate the implications of my position with two examples. The first example is a

discussion of one of David Kings major historical claims. The second example challenges in

the same time the still dominant uncritical usage of Arabic biographical dictionaries for

understanding important historical events or trends and the long standing belief among

Western and Eastern historians and historians of science that Sunni orthodoxy opposed from

the eighth to the nineteenth centuries the sciences that were introduced into Islamic societies

through the translations of Pahlavi, Persian, Syriac, Greek, and Sanskrit philosophical and

scientific literature. In a recently invited paper for Muzaffar Iqbals journal Science and

Islam, David King briefly summarized the claim I wish to discuss in the following manner:

All of my studies clearly distinguish between:

(1) the scientific tradition pursued by the select few in Islamic societies, and

(2) the folk scientific tradition (devoid of any mathematics beyond simple arithmetic and

of any astronomy other than what can be observed with the naked eye) favored by the

legal scholars of Islam.

Take the case of a 14th-century Muslim scholar who compiled a table displaying the qiblah in

degrees and minutes for each degree of latitude and longitude difference from Makkah to

serve the entire Muslim world. He compiled this table not only because he was a Muslim

but because he was a mathematician and a Muslim. In fact, he was one of the leading

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mathematicians anywhere in the world at the time. (al-Khalili) Other approaches to such a

qiblah table, such as art-historical or palaeographical - can only be labelled inadequate.

The apologetic approach with such tables, Muslims were able to face the qiblah

correctly for over a millennium is superficial and also historically incorrect, for, in fact,

the table was known only in a very restricted geographical and chronological milieu.

Contemporaneous legal scholars were proposing completely different means for finding the

qiblah anyway and would never have considered using a table for that purpose.

In his new book In Synchrony of the Heavens. Volume One. The Call of the Muezzin, King

adds that there was not only a disciplinary divide that separated astronomers from legal

scholars, but also a regional and cultural barrier:

There were two main traditions in Islamic astronomy: folk or ethno- astronomy

and mathematical astronomy. The first was widely known; the second was practised only

by a select minority. As a result, there were two main streams in astronomical timekeeping in

Islam: one operating at an extremely simple and sometimes even primitive level, the other

involving complicated and sometimes highly sophisticated procedures. The first of these

traditions was practised throughout the Islamic world; the second seems to have been

restricted mainly to Egypt (13thcentury onwards), Syria, the Yemen, and also Tunis (14th

century onwards). There is little evidence on the practice in the rest of the Islamic world,

notably the Maghrib, al-Iraq, Iran, Central Asia and India. (p. 632)

All zijes contained geographical tables listing the longitude and latitudes of major

localities; often the qibla would be tabulated as well. Also, tables were available from the 9th

century onwards displaying the qibla for each degree of latitude and longitude, based on either

approcimate or exact formulae: From the 14thcentury onwards magnetic compasses with

qibla-indicators for various localities were in use, and these proliferated in Ottoman Turkey

and particularly in Safavid Iran: Particularly impressive are three world-maps centred on

Mecca engraved on brass and made on Isfahan ca. 1675; they each bear a cartographic grid

that preserves direction and distance to Mecca.

Yet it is clear that in the medieval period astronomers were seldom consulted on the

matter of the qibla. Firstly, when dealing with the obligation to face the Kaba in prayer, the

legal texts do not suggest that one should consult an astronomer or a muwaqqit. Rather, they

advocate entirely different non-mathematical methods for finding the qibla. Secondly, it is

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clear from the orientations of many medieval mosques that various non-mathematicl methods

were used in each of the major regions of the Islamic world. Only a minority of such mosques

face the directions computed by astronomers. (p. 670)

King supports his findings based on the study of innumerable manuscripts and instruments by

statements of muezzins and astronomers that point to a gap in values and to a further social

divide. A Yemeni muezzin wrote for instance in the 13thcentury:

The times of prayer are not to be found by the degrees of the astrolabe and not by

calculation using the science of the astronomers; they are only to be found by observation ,

The astronomers took their knowledge from Euclid and (the authors of) the Sindhind, and

from Aristotle and other philosophers; all of them were infidels. (p. 636)

Two centuries earlier, in Ghazna, al-Biruni had chided the muezzins for consulting books of

law on what he considered to be scientific matters. Al-Biruni reported that additionally two

Kings scientific and folk astronomers there was a third group whose members come from the

common people and whose

hearts are disgusted by the mention of shadows, or altitude, or sines, and they get

goosepimples at the mere sight of computation or scientific instruments. With them it reaches

such an extent that one cannot trust them with anything of the sort, much less with the times

of prayer, not because of their unfaithfulness or treason, but because of excessive ignorance.

(p. 636)

Given the enormous evidence piled up by King for his claims about the disciplinary, cultural,

social, and moral abyss between astronomers/muwaqqits on the one hand and legal

scholars/muezzins on the other hand, why do I feel uncomfortable? My problems are mainly

methodological in nature. They arise on three levels:

1. the identification of the professional profiles of the people involved

2. the types of sources used for extracting evidence

3. the methods applied for evaluating the used sources.

King knows very well that different kinds of professionals dealing with mathematical

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astronomy and geography existed in different Islamic societies and periods. He himself

discusses the appearances of names such as muaddil and sahib al-qibla in al-Andalus and

the Maghrib as possible equivalents to the Egyptian and Syrian muwaqqit. He also knows

perfectly well that before the 13thcenturies most, if not all experts dealing with mathematical

astronomy and geography were called munajjim . They worked either at courts or on the

streets and earned their living as astrologers. Astrology was the second aspect of the

professional profile of a munajjim, if not his primordial qualification. In contrast, the

muwaqqit, the muaddil, and possibly the sahib al-qibla were linked to the mosque and

later also to the madrasa. The muwaqqit was responsible for providing the muezzin with the

information derived from scientific expertise that the muezzin lacked. Most of the muwaqqits

King studied were full-time salaried employees of the mosques and madrasas. Their

appointments occasionally were stipulated in the founding waqf deed, but very few such

deeds have come down to us. Because the same seems to apply to the office of the muezzin,

muwaqqits apparently were among the additionally hired personal. In any case, there is no

substantial study of the details about who hired men to perform the tasks of the muezzin and

muwaqqit, who paid the salaries, who supervised their works, or who regulated cases of

conflict.

Conflicts should have arisen regularly if Kings conclusion is correct that muwaqqits and their

works were ignored in the daily affairs of Muslim communities. It must have been utterly

frustrating to spend a lifetime of labouring for the community and never receive any kind of

recognition. Why anybody would want to study such an unpromising discipline and choose

such an unrewarding professional career when other, more attractive opportunities were

available is beyond my ability to understand. The only possible satisfaction reaped from such

a bleak affair might have been to do science for sciences sake. To be honest, I would not

volunteer for such a life. I love doing research, but I need to get feedback both on the

intellectual and on the social level. While in Kings view the muwaqqit got plenty of

intellectual feedback from his students, equals, and enemies, he did not reap any social

reward.

This is one point where I disagree with King. At the end of the 13thcentury, Ibn Khallikan (d.

1282) mentioned merely one single muezzin for his involvement with the nilometer in the

eleventh century and no muwaqqit. Some 200 years later, Shams al-Din al-Sakhawi (d. 1496)

devoted numerous entries in his biographical dictionary to muwaqqits. These entries do not

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merely talk about the training of future experts for mathematical, astronomical, and

instrumental methods for timekeeping, the determination of the qibla, and the calculation of

the new moon. They rather show that in the 15thcentury, muwaqqits had reached the heights

of education available at the period in Egypt and Syria. What had happened in the two

centuries between Ibn Khallikan and al-Sakhawi that made this transformation from

non-.existence to inclusion among the educated Muslim elite come to pass? Members of the

Mamluk dynasty promoted actively the ascent of the muwaqqit, but the muezzin into the class

of the formally trained ulama. Let me document this royal patronage with two brief examples.

In the second half of the 14thcentury, the Mamluk Sultan al-Hasan donated Cairos greatest

madrasa. The school financed 506 students, 400 among them studied law according to one of

the four madhhabs. Additionally, there were paid classes in tafsir, hadith, usul al-fiqh, Arabic

language, medicine, and ilm al-miqat. (Berkey 1992, p. 69) Although the class for ilm al-

miqat only intended to pay for six students, Sultan al-Hasans inclusion of this branch of

astronomy represents its definite acknowledgement as one of the subjects to be studied and

taught at a madrasa. In the first half of the fifteenth century, Sultan Baybars appointed Shihab

al-Din Ibn al-Majdi (d. 1446) as muwaqqit at the Azhar mosque and as head of the teachers at

the Janibakiyya Dawadariyya madrasa. This appointment reinforces what Sultan al-Hasan had

done before. It shows that the Mamluk Sultan considered ilm al-miqat the equal of the legal

disciplines. A student of this science could become director of a madrasa, teach his field

together with the mathematical sciences, philosophy, and fiqh, and turn the madrasa into a

Sufi convent. Without doubt, Ibn al-Majdi was a very respected and very powerful scholar in

his time and place. As a muwaqqit, he was first a teacher of legal matters himself, second

equal in rank to legal scholars, and third he was not only a specialist in ilm al-miqat and

related mathematical fields, but had a broader training in other ancient sciences.

As King has shown Mamluk sultans did not exercise this patronage for nothing. They did care

for erecting their new mosques, madrasas, and tombs according to the qibla of the muwaqqits.

They cared indeed so much that they modified the older Fatimid buildings, which deviated by

some degrees from the astronomical qibla. Hence, in a local perspective, muwaqqits did have

their say in religious practice. Thus the question is not whether Mamluk muwaqqits were

socially isolated. It is rather what motivated Mamluk sultans to promote muwaqqits and

follow their advice. A second question is what made the institution of muwaqqit spreading

from Egypt and Syria in certain directions, but not in others. And what kinds of opposition,

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rejection, and adaptation did the muwaqqits have to face outside the Mamluk territory? To

answer this kind of questions, a quotation from al-Biruni or an uncontextualized scorn of the

Yemeni scholar will not do.

As the two examples indicate other sources than astronomical and legal texts have the power

to shift our attention and to alter our questions. Waqf deeds, biographical dictionaries, papers

of court cases, historical chronicles, archival documents, and inscriptions need to be included

in the analysis when we want to find out what were the relative powers of muwaqqits and

fuqaha over the daily and monthly regulation of time and ritual in a concrete local

environment. Moreover, there are a few texts extant that indicate that outside the Arabic and

Ottoman territories that were populated by muwaqqits other forms of communication took

place between legal scholars and astronomers. A Persian text on the astrolabe written under

the Safavid dynasty while explaining the construction of an astrolabe and its functions also

includes very brief references to what Hanafi and Shafii legal scholars recommend to do. An

anonymous Persian text kept in a library at Hyderabad describes one after the other scientific

methods for determining the qibla and non-scientific methods. These two texts may be the

exception that proves the rule. But they also may be the tip of an iceberg. Or they may

indicate local particularities that we tend to overlook when we draw conclusions for the entire

Islamic world on the basis of locally bound textual and instrumental material

The two texts just mentioned cause me to ask which kind of evidence can inform us about

who decided what was done in practice in a specific Muslim community and how the

hierarchies of decision-making were ordered. Does the rejection of scientific methods by a

scholar who lived in a small town tell us something about the practice in an urban centre?

Does the critique at astrology by a religious scholar who lived in a major provincial capital

truly mean that he rejected astronomy? King points to the Shafii qadi Taj al-Din al-Subkis

(d. 1369) complaint in the first half of the 14thcentury that astrologers and magicians

proliferated amongst the muwaqqits and wondered whether his opinion that fann al-haya was

important for muwaqqits expressed his incompetence in the discipline or his familiarity with

the ground-breaking research in this field by his contemporary and compatriot Ibn al-Shatir,

the muwaqqit at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. (p. 651)

Livingstons analysis of the book Miftah Dar al-Saada by al-Subkis slightly older Hanbali

colleague Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1347) shows that Kings reading of al-Subkis

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complaint probably heads into the wrong direction. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya was an ardent

admirer of al-Biruni whom he considered the greatest scientist of Islam. He accepted the

scientific value of astronomy, but rejected astrology. He did so partly because of the standard

reasons that the belief in the power of the planets undermined the belief in tawhid and that

astrology was an art, no science, and hence uncertain. More importantly, however, Ibn

Qayyim al-Jawziyyas major argument against astrology and other occult sciences was the

same as that used a little bit later by al-Subki. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya saw in the occult

sciences the major rising threat to religious stability and civilization. Livingston interpreted

Ibn Qayyims sharp attack against the occult sciences as a service to religious and scientific

purity:

In a reversal of the Islamic rationalist tradition informed by the hanbali jurists great

Muslim predecessors, al-Kindi (d. 890 (sic)), al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (d. 1038), Ibn Tufayl

(d. 1185) and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), who had all defended philosophy and the non-Arab

sciences by referring to scripture, Ibn al-Qayyim employed science to defend a religion

cleansed of alien accretions, and in arguing his case incidentally defended a purified rational

science and logic free of transmutational alchemy, astrology and augury that he saw as having

displaced true science.

True science according to Ibn Qayyim is a science which has supporting proofs based

ultimately on sense experience and constraints imposed by the rational mind. Astrology did

not fall unter this header since it is based on nothing but ignorance, conjecture and opinion.

It has nothing of truth. Its practitioners merely follow a tradition absent of all proof and

verification.

Ibn Qayyim drew on major Muslim and Christian astronomers of previous centuries such as

Ibn al-Haytham al-Biruni, and Isa b. Ali b. Isa to build his case that astrology was not a true

science, but a threat to religion and science alike. He defended Islamic philosophers such as

al-Farabi and Ibn Sina as scholars who had unified sharia and falsafa, neither one

subordinated to the other, but one complementing the other in that they each in their own

universe of discourse present facets of a transcendent reality. When one would appear to

contradict the other, it is only in appearance, the consequence of a shortcoming in language

and expression. After applying to philosophy an argument that al-Ghazali had used to defend

tasawwuf, Ibn Qayyim concluded that in order to protect true Islam from the occult threat

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people needed to be taught the true sciences in order to raise their level of understanding and

increase their immunity against the lure of magic, divination, and astrology.

Rather than hissing the banner of war against astronomy, Taj al-Din al-Subki in his attack

against the spread of astrology and soothsaying among the muwaqqits merely took up Ibn al-

Qayyims battle cry for the defence of religion by the study of scientific truth.

Legal scholars in fourteenth-century Syria, contrary to Kings interpretation of the sources,

were not principal adversary of mathematical astronomy. They rather attacked the muwaqqits

for improper behaviour both as a Muslim and as a scientist. Does this mean that the reason for

the lacking impact of the muwaqqits on religious ritual stems from the advance of the occult

sciences? I rather doubt that such a conclusion is closer to the historical truth. I think what we

need is a careful study of the manifold available sources of fourteenth-century Syria and

Egypt in order to assemble information about the various points of debate and conflict. We

also need to know many more judgments and descriptions of emotions that concern the

attitudes of different scholars, rulers, officers, students, notables, and other people towards

the problems of their time, their town, and their quarter and how these problems related to the

different types of sciences and their contemporary practices. Only such in-depth studies can

guide us in our search for the elusive daughter of time.

Legal scholars in fourteenth-century Syria tended to be informed about basic tenets of the

mathematical sciences and their theoretical foundations. They also were familiar with the

main points of metaphysics and often studied logic. They did not turn, however, into scientists

themselves. There was no real need for them to do so, since the muwaqqits filled exactly this

space. When we look to other regions of the Islamic world where the profession of muwaqqit

is not attested in the sources, we find a different picture. In Iran and in the Maghrib fuqaha

and mutakallimun turned indeed into full-fledged astronomers compiling Zijes and discussing

planetary theory. A representative of the jurist-astronomer is Ibn al-Banna in al-Maghrib. A

representative of the mutakallim-astronomer is Shams al-Din al-Khafri in Iran.

Hence, when we wish to gain a nuanced understanding of who regulated religious practice

with which methods and tools, we also need to study the roles that such hybrid types of

scholars played and how they related to other hybrid types like those who taught usul al-din

together with philosophy.

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Summing up my scepticism towards Kings evaluation of the many sources he studied and the

conclusions he drew from his immense labour, I wish to say that Kings two piles of scientific

and non-scientific methods for determining the qibla, the hilal, and the times for salat need to

be situated in their proper local context before we truly can say we know that those Muslim

experts who produced all the impressive scientific methods for the purposes of Muslim

religious practice sat in a professional ivory tower the key to whose door was either never

produced or long lost.

In my second example I wish to take up the issue of how do we arrive to an appropriate

evaluation of historical sources and their claims. In a recent paper abput Suhrawardi al-

Maqtul, the Martyr of Aleppo, Roxanne Marcotte claimed that politically and religiously

motivated trials occurred periodically: Sayf al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Amidi (d. 1233) was

dismissed from the chair he held at the madrasa al-Aziziyya by al-Malik al-Ashraf, the

Ayyubid ruler of Damascus, for having taught philosophy and theology, having been equally

suspected of political treason; and during the reign of al-Salih Ismail, ruler of Damscus, the

Shafii Grand Qadi, Rafi al-Din al-Jili was accused of professing suspicious doctrines in the

midst of a financial scandal and suffered an end no less tragic than that of al-Hallaj, Ayn al-

Qudat al-Hamadhani, or al-Suhrawardi. (Marcotte 2001, p. 396) She draws from these

claims conclusions about the relationship that connected the Damascene religious elite with

the ruling sultans or their representatives. I am not concerned here with these conclusions,

although I am not convinced that they are well argued for. I am rather concerned with the

interpretation of the sources that lead to consider Sayf al-Din al-Amidis dismissal from his

mansab at the Aziziyya and the execution of al-Jili as equal in scope and meaning among

themselves and with regard to the execations of al-Hallaj, Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamdhani, and al-

Suhrawardi. I will focus on the stories told about al-Amidi. My claim is that there is a long-

standing tradition of singling out from the stories told for instance by Ibn Khallikan, al-

Dhahabi, and Ibn al-Qifti merely one element and considering this element as the key to the

event. This element is the accusation that al-Amidi taught philosophy and other rational

sciences, corrupted the faith of his students, and hence had to retire into house arrest as a

result of the fatwa of Ibn al-Salah against the teaching of philosophy and logic. This line of

interpretation was opened by the eminent Hungarian student of Islam Ignaz Goldziher and

maintained by many later scholars in Europe and America. Goldziher in his famous paper Die

Stellung der alten islamischen Orthodoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften (The attitude of the

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old Islamic orthodoxy towards the ancient sciences) characterized Ibn al-Salahs fatwa as the

worded expression of the sentiment which ruled at that time the orthodoy. In Cairo, where

al-Amidi lived earlier, he was prosecuted in a fanatical manner by people who studied law

because of his philosophical studies which he pursued as a subsidiary discipline, although he

did not teach them. He was accused of corruption of faith, confession of tatil (denying of

all positive attributes of God), and of adherence to the philosophical school. Al-Amidi fled

to Syria, first to Hamah, then to Damascus. He lost his teaching position in Damascus because

of suspicions similar to those in Cairo. Goldziher terminates his report wih the exclamation:

An example of life for the theoretical doctrine of Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrzuri. (Goldziher

1915, pp. 393-4)

Another modern version can be found in the Encyclopedia of Islam, the standard reference

book which enjoys the highest prestige among contemporary scholars of Islamic civilization.

Dominique Sourdel sees in al-Amidis intellectual powers and his knowledge of the rationals

ciences the cause of his having been accused of heresy. This accusation pushed him to flee

(from Cairo) to Hamah into the service of the local Ayyubid ruler. After the latters death, al-

Amidi was summoned to Damascus by al-Malik al-Muazzam who conferred on him the

chair of the madrasa al-Aziziyya (617/1220-21). (EI, n.s., vol.1, 1986, p. 434) After

629/1229 al-Amidi was dismissed from his post by al-Malik al-Ashraf, for having taught

philosophy.

Both scholars used as their main historical source Ibn Khalikans dictionary. Sourdel also

quotes in his bibliography Ibn al-Qifti. They not ignore important parts in Ibn Khallikans

story. Sourdel also keeps silence over the fact that Ibn al-Qifti presents an altogether different

story, the story of apparent political high treason. Furthermore, none of the two bothered to

investigate the variant forms of the story about why al-Amidi lost his office. I know of at least

five stories that were written by contemporaries of al-Amidi and of again at least five stories

told by later historians and biographers. Already the contemporary reports deviate profoundly

from each other. The later writers combined several of these contemporary, but conflicting

stories with each other and shaped their information in specific ways that obviously were

expressions of the authors own goals and perspectives. The five contemporary stories are

impossible to harmonize and fit into a single coherent narrative. This means that not all of

them reflect historical truth. They rather show that strong interests shaped the information

transmitted by the individual historian and biographer. These interests are rarely speled out

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explicitly. But I think it is safe to assume that notions about what was the appropriate way to

present the Ayyubid dynasty and individual princes, concepts about the acceptable syle of

writing biographies of scholars, the fear of endangering the historians position of that of a

particular scholarly faction of Damascus, and the authors wish to present his own personality

and scholarly importance in a way he considered feasible and adequate all were among these

interests.

As for the probable historical nucleus of the stories about al-Amidi, that is the historical truth

of this specific case, the only elements that I can accept with some certainty are those which

report about his loss of positions. Neither al-Malik al-Ashrafs alleged anti-philosophical

attitude nor al-Amidis teaching of philosophy appear to be historically reliable reasons for his

dismissal. Not only is the Damascene case in some sources accompanied by a story about his

fortunes in Cairo which clearly unveils the Cairene accusations as a deliberate cabal by some

of his fellow-scholars who envied him for his intellectual and rhetorical capacities and for the

public attention and admiration he attracted, al-Amidis Damascene case itself is literally the

only case reported in the contemporary sources for proving al-Ashrafs anti-philosophical

politics, while there is a multitude of contemporary Damascene scholars noted for their

occupation with and excellence in the ancient sciences, among whom we find people of al-

Ashrafs immediate entourage. This means the story about al-Amidis loss of his position due

to al-Ashrafs anti-philosophical politics is circular. Al-Amidis loss proves al-Ashrafs

politics and al-Ashrafs politics causes al-Amidis loss.

The later stories reshape the earlier information in such a way that they have to be interpreted

as historical constructions rather than as simple defective transmissions. In the Cairence case,

the points of accusation are reordered and reformulated. In the Damascene case, al-Ashraf

emerges as carrying out an all-embracing crusade against the teaching and studying of any of

the ancient sciences at all the madrasas of the city, something that he lacked both the power

and the will to accomplish.

The most likely story albeit no the earliest narrative of the events is the one presented by the

historian of the Ayyubid dynasty Ibn Wasil (d. 1298). Ibn Wasil had studied, among other

things, the mathematical sciences with Alam al-Din al-Qaysar and presumably philosophy or

kalam with Shams al-Din Khusrawshai, a student of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. He edicated works

on astronomy and logic to Ayyubid princes and to Manfred, the son of Frederic II. In 1261, he

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served the Mamluk sultan Baybars as an ambassador to Manfred, then king of Sicily. Ibn

Wasil wrote:

Al-Malik al-Nasir when ruling Dmascus occasionally summoned the best scholars to

participate in a majlis. Among themwere al-Amidi, Shams al-Din Khusrawshahi, the Shaykh

Taj al-Din al-Urmawi, and the judge Shams al-Din al-Khuwai (d. 637/1239). In these

session, the faction of the Persians rallied against al-Amidi as if they were a single hand.

Al-Malik al-Ashraf turned away from al-Amidi and loathed him. Then al-Malik al-Masud,

the lord of Amida, sent and asked for him. Then Amida was taken from him and al-Malik al-

Kamil said to the captured lord of Amida: In your country, you have no one of excellene. But

he erred and the lord answered: I had sent to the Shaykh Sayf al-Din to demand him (to come

to me), and I was promised that he would come to me. This was so painful for al-Malik al-

Ashraf and al-Malik al-Kamil that the two of them grew angry against Sayf al-Din. As a

consequence, al-Malik al-Ashraf dismissed him from the teaching at the Aziziyya madrasa.

He withdrew to his garden and stayed there as an oppressed until he died in this year (that is

630/1231-1232) being half a year older than 80 years.

Additionally to the fact that he does not mention with a single word the anti-philosophical

backbone of the story as told by other authors such as Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1256), Ibn

Khallikan, and later historians such as al-Dhahabi (d. 1348), the two surprising elements in

Ibn Wasils report are his reference to a conflict between two scholarly factions at the

Ayyubid court of Damascus the so-called Persian faction, that is students of Fakhr al-Din al-

Razi, and al-Amidi as a one-member party and al-Amidis alleged involvement in Ayyubid

clashes with the Artuqid ruler of al-Amidis home-town. Since we know that al-Amidi was

not only immensely famous already during his lifetime for his legal and theological works,

but also wrote a commentary against Fakhr al-Din al-Razis sharp critique at Ibn Sinas late

philosophical work Isharat wa-tanbihat (Pointers and Reminders), Ibn Wasils report about

attacks of Fakhr al-Dins students at al-Amidi is probably well-founded. He may even have

learned this very interesting aspect of the difficulties al-Amidi endured during the last years of

his life from his teacher in philosophy Shams al-Din al-Khusrawshahi. The element of high

treason does not appears for the first time in Ibn Wasils History of the Ayyubids. It also

appeared in the very first story about al-Amidis misfortunes written by the ancient vizier of

the Ayyubid ruler of Aleppo Ibn al-Qifti. No other compiler of a biographical dictionary

that I know took up either of the two points. All the other biographers either focused on the

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corruption of Muslim faith due to al-Amidis teaching of philosophy or ignored most facets of

the conflict. Let me quote to give you an example from Abd al-Rahman al-Isnawis Al-

Tabaqat al-Sahfiiyya starting with the events in Cairo:

then a group envied him. They accused him of corruption of faith. They wrote a

protocol about that. It was taken to someone of them to write on it as they had done, and he

wrote: They envied the man because they could not equal him in merit, such are his foes and

accusers. And God (alone) knows. He signed xy. After Sayf al-Din saw this, he left he town

secretly until he came to Syria. He took his domicile in Hamah. Then he came to Damscus.

Al-Muazzam entrusted him with the Aziziyya madrasa. And after his brother al-Ashraf

(took over the) rule he dismissed him from it and proclaimed in the madaris: he who talks

about something else than tafsir, fiqh, and hadith will be expelled from the town.

Even if you may refuse to accept my inclination to consider Ibn al-Qiftis political point and

Ibn Wasils reference to a clash between different faction of the Damascene ulama as closer

to historical truth than Sibt Ibn al-Jawzis, Ibn Khalikans al-Dhahabis, or al-Isnawis stories

about al-Ashrafs anti-philosophical attitude and his contempt for al-Amidi, you will surely

concede two other of my points:

1. in order to find out what may have truly happened one has to study all available

reports, compare their various elements, and find out the beliefs and goals of the

individual authors of the reports;

2. al-Amidis fellow-colleagues were immersed in all the conflicts that surrounded him

and cost him repeatedly his teaching posts, that is al-Amidis fate was much more

shaped by his colleagues than by his royal superior.

In this sense, veritas is not so much a daughter of time than a daughter of either blindness

caused by prejudices and selectivity or of detective work like that of Hercule Poirot or

Sherlock Holmes.

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Veritas Filia Temporis