User:Tanvi.baghele/Book of Fixed Stars

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Historical Context
The treatise was written in the Persian city of Shiraz, for the patron and Buyid emir ‘Abud al-Dawla. Although al-Sufi made his longitudinal calculations correct for the year 964 only, the work remained highly influential, functioning as the standard text on Arabic astronomy to be consulted in all Islamic territories and faithfully copied for many centuries after its production. Since it was only correct for the single year of 964, the Book of Fixed Stars was intended to serve a broader educational purpose, rather than being concerned with the mathematical technicalities of astronomy.

The Book of Fixed Stars is representative of the concerns of Islamic scholars during the late-9th to 11th Centuries AD, where following the translation of Hellenistic texts from Greek to Arabic, “Islamic astronomers and astrologers concentrated on analyzing, criticizing, and perfecting the geometrical models of Ptolemy.” Medival Islamic astronomers also drew from Sanskrit and Middle Persian sources to learn "methods for calculating the position of heavenly bodies, and for creating tables recording the movement of the sun, the moon, and the five known planets." Al-Sufi also drew from Anwa', the pre-Islamic astronomical system that was used by Bedouin Arabs. In the context of this shift to observational and theoretical astronomy set in motion by the translation movement, and with al-Sufi himself being an observational astronomer, the Book of Fixed Stars comprises an important organisation and revision of classical knowledge from antiquity (the first of its kind), and some of the earliest surviving examples of visual documentation of celestial bodies observable by the naked eye, though knowledge of these constellations was wide spread before Al-Sufi's time, as shown by their presence on globes from earlier dates. The translation movement was started in the 8th century, during the golden age of Abbasid rule, which allowed the populace to focus more on academic and social interests rather than political issues. The abbasid empire was also one of the most culturally diverse, which also lead to the increase in wealth of knowledge available to the Islamic world, spurring the research into astronomy The interest in cataloging the stars also stems from the nature of worship in Islam. The religion requires that its members are able to locate Mecca so that they may pray in the right direction, and to also be able to determine the correct times for prayer. In addition to the daily requirements, during the festival of Ramadan they must also know the moments of sunrise and sunset for fasting, and the fixed location of the moon for the start of each new month.

The Book of Fixed stars also marks a trend of an increased production of illustrated manuscripts, as it is one of the oldest surviving treatise of its kind. This is not to say that this text was the first illustrated manuscript ever created, as there are many illustrated fragments that have been found and studied, most notably the Fustat fragments. The Fustat Frgaments are illustrated scraps of parchment that were found during excavations in Fustat, or Old Cairo. These fragments can be attributed to the stylings of the Fatimid period (969-1171), therefore dating the existence of astronomical illustrations to many years before the creation of The Book of Fixed Stars. The increase in illustrated manuscripts is also related to the advent of paper in the Islamic world in the tenth century. The increased availability of this material, which was much cheaper than the previously used parchment, drove the production of books in the Islamic world.

editions
English translation now available:

Hafez, Ihsan (2010) Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi and his book of the fixed stars: a journey of re-discovery. PhD thesis, James Cook University.