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BJHS 37(1): 1–28, March 2004. f British Society for the History of Science DOI : 10.1017/S0007087403005302 The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart : the Ottoman cultural context for the introduction of post-Copernican astronomy A V N E R B E N-Z A K E N* Abstract. In 1637 a Frenchman named Noël Duret (Durret) published a book in Paris that referred to the heliocentric Copernican system. In 1660 an Ottoman scholar named Ibrāhı̄m Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated the book into Arabic. For more than three centuries this manuscript was buried in an Ottoman archive in Istanbul until it resurfaced at the beginning of the 1990s. The discovery of the Arabic text has necessitated a re-evaluation of the history of early modern Arabic natural philosophy, one that takes into account the intellectual context of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi and the overarching trends in the world of Sufi mysticism. These trends were reflected in art, literature, philosophy and natural philosophy. Using philological and cultural clues, as well as Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s own words, we can attempt deductions about why, how and for what purposes Ibrāhı̄m Efendi chose Duret’s book for his project. Reacting to a well-entrenched assumption by historians that Islamic natural philosophy went into a decline and stagnated after the rise of Islamic non-rational and mystical elements, the modern Turkish scholar Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu has gone a long way towards proving, from his point of view, that Islamic natural philosophy had its own efflorescence, one that rose within a creative awareness of the ‘ scientific revolution ’.1 His cataloguing of scientific manuscripts would show that ‘ Ottoman science ’ had closely followed European innovations and was progressing too, as a detached part of European developments. Ihsanoglu argues that from early on Islamic scholars had been interested in the Copernican system and that, in spite of the rise of mysticism, certain islands of rational scientific activity survived in astronomy. Among his more exciting discoveries was an Ottoman-Turkish manuscript, which is a copy of an apparently original manuscript in Arabic. The text contains the first known reference to the Copernican system. What was discovered in fact was the translation by Ibrāhı̄m * Department of History, University of California, 6265 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA. I would like to thank Theodore Porter, Hossein Ziai, Carlo Ginzburg, Robert Westman, Mary Terrall, Benjamin Elman, Norton Wise, Herbert Davidson and Ahmad Alwisha for the notes and the encouragement. Thanks to Howard Goodman for the notes and the stylish English. Special thanks to the anonymous referees for the illuminating notes. The paper was first presented at the History of Science Colloquium at UCLA. 1 Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, ‘Introduction of western science to the Ottoman world: a case study of modern astronomy (1660–1860)’, in Transfer of Modern Science and Technology to the Muslim World (ed. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu), Istanbul, 1992. See also Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (ed.), Osmanli Astronomi Literaturu Tarihi (‘history of astronomic literature during the Ottoman period’), 2 vols., Istanbul, 1997, i, 340–5. 2 Avner Ben-Zaken Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci, a Muslim, of Noël Duret’s Novae motuum caelestium ephemerides Richelianae. This rare copy of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s translation was reproduced in the late eighteenth century and circulated as a lithographic edition, which I found in the national library of Egypt.2 My task is to trace carefully the transmission of Duret’s book, as well as the motives of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi for translating it. Yet there are stumbling blocks in all directions. Who was Noël Duret and how significant was his book in relation to others concerning the Copernican system ? His name does not occur in English or French surveys of the ‘ scientific revolution ’. He has no entry of his own in the DSB, being mentioned there in passing as someone who wrote on Kepler. And otherwise he is listed only in the British Library Catalogue and the Bibliothéque nationale as author of Novae motuum caelestium ephemerides Richelianae (1637).3 Upon examining one of the two extant copies of Novae motuum caelestium ephemerides Richelianae, one is immediately aware that it is primarily a book about astrology, not astronomy. It contains a collection of tracts on astrology as well as astronomical tables for different longitudes, including Istanbul. It deals with astrology from the angle of mysticism, hermeticism and geometry and has a discussion on the concept of infinity and medical astrology. The ‘ problems of the heavens ’ for Duret were mainly in terms of the primus mobiles and questions of precession and trepidation. In his work he made an extensive technical usage of Kepler’s elliptical hypothesis and confessed in the title page that the Richelian Tables are a reduction of Rudolphine Tables to the meridian of Paris. Although Tycho and Kepler are key figures in Duret’s analysis, Copernicus, as well as heliocentrism, are on the margin. It seems that in using new technicalities from Kepler’s works without accepting the premise of heliocentrism, Duret cleared the question of the motion of the planets in order to move on to larger questions about the essence of what makes the heavenly bodies move and why they move. Hence geometry, mathematics and mysticism were tools to learn about the ‘ souls of the stars’. Moreover, who was Ibrāhı̄m Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci ? A dictionary of Ottoman biography, Sicill Osmani, has many entries for ‘ Ibrāhı̄m Efendi ’, but none refers to a 2 To qualify this, it is the first translation that we know about. The judgement of Ihsanoglu in this regard, however, is highly reliable, based on his editing the catalogues of scientific manuscripts in Turkish libraries. I have examined the catalogue of scientific manuscripts in the National Library of Egypt and found no evidence of a translation prior to 1660. In the National Library of Egypt I did find a later lithographic Ottoman-Turkish edition from the late eighteenth century; however, in this version we do not find the introduction in the version used by Ihsanoglu. This lithographic version was not catalogued by David King and does not have a catalogue number, but it could be obtained at UCLA library. On the Turkish catalogues in Istanbul University, Kutuphane, see Fehmi Edhem Karatay (ed.), Arpaca basmalar alfabe katalouge, Istanbul, 1953; Ramazan Sesen, Cevat Izgi and Cemil Akpinar (eds.), Catalogue of Manuscripts in The Koprulu Library, Introduction by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Istanbul, 1986, 3 vols.; Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (ed.), Catalogue of Islamic Medical Manuscripts in the Libraries of Turkey, Istanbul, 1984; Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (ed.), Union Catalogue of Periodicals in Arabic Script, Istanbul, 1986; Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (ed.), Bibliography on Manuscript Libraries in Turkey and the Publications on the Manuscripts Located in these Libraries, Istanbul, 1995. For manuscripts in Egypt, see David King (ed.), Fihras al-makhtūtāt al-‘ ilmı̄yya al-mahfūzah bi Dār al-Kutub al-Misriyya (‘catalogue of the scientific manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library’), Cairo, 1981. 3 BLC, vol. 89, 523–4. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 3 Figure 1. Illustration from the title page of The New Richelian Ephemerides. Duret presents the pillars of astronomy as Ptolemy, Tycho and Landsberg, while excluding Copernicus. (Reproduced courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, California.) ‘ Tezkireci ’ or to a person interested in astronomy and astrology. Mu’jam al-mu’allifı̄n, the biographical dictionary of Arabic writers, is similarly unhelpful. Neither does his name appear in Egyptian and Turkish catalogues of scientific manuscripts from the period. Framing the minor tasks of tracing books and translators, however, is a larger set of questions having to do with the migration of European natural philosophy to the Islamic world in the early modern period and the way in which this has been addressed by historians of Islamic natural philosophy. Many have pointed out that Islamic natural philosophy formed an important bridge in this regard, and they have alluded to the openness of Islam and its great contribution to the rise of the new natural philosophy in Europe. However, little has been written on the migration of European natural philosophy to the Islamic world in the early modern period. 4 Avner Ben-Zaken The neglect is not surprising.4 Previously, historians of early modern Islamic natural philosophy and culture conceived of early modern Islamic culture as stagnant or in decline.5 They asserted a sort of disequilibrium – a ‘ progressive ’ Europe and a ‘ backward ’ Islam, blaming the supposed lethargy of Islamic natural philosophy on the defeat of rationalism and the rise of mysticism.6 Some argued that the stagnation was brought on by two twelfth-century philosophers – al-Ghazzālı̄ and Suhrawardı̄, who launched devastating critiques on the notion of rationalism, causality and certainty.7 Al-Ghazzālı̄ (d. 1111) took a theological angle in his Tahāfut al-falāsifah (‘ the incoherence of philosophers ’), which tried to demonstrate that philosophers are unable to prove religious truths and have no tools to understand God’s reasoning. The second attack, by the illuminist Suhrawardı̄ (d. 1191), took a logical angle. His Hikmat al-ishrāq (‘the philosophy of illumination ’) suggested that causality and other peripatetic categories were only a construction of the human mind. This line on Islamic natural philosophy also asserted that the works of al-Ghazzālı̄ and Suhrawardı̄ gave rise to and played a central role in the rise of Islamic mysticism (Sufism), which thus sent Islamic natural philosophy into a sort of deep sleep, until confronting the new European natural philosophy only later in the age of Western colonialism. It is to this sort of master narrative that recent toilers, like Ihsanoglu, have responded. Ihsanoglu, as with any scholar, relies on the skilful innovators before him who changed the older narrative in order to say that Islamic natural philosophy had made great strides until the fourteenth century – its apogee. This newer interpretation was made mainly through an internalist approach that looked for developments in astronomical models and techniques, by and large ignoring the external contexts of culture. It argued that the notion of decline ignores the ceaseless interaction and migration of scientific knowledge that took place between Europe and the Islamic world.8 For 4 It is starting to be corrected. See an anthology of papers of a conference at Oklahoma University : Tradition, Transmission, Transformation : Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma (ed. J. Ragep and S. Ragep), Leiden, 1996. 5 See Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum, Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, Menasha, WI, 1955, 120; Aydin Sayili, ‘The causes of the decline of scientific work in Islam’, in idem, The Observatory in Islam and Its Place in the General History of the Observatory, Ankara, 1960, 422; John Joseph Saunders, ‘ The problem of Islamic decadence’, Journal of World History (1963), 7, 719. 6 Aydin Sayili blamed the decline of Ottoman science on a failure to reconcile science with both philosophy and religion. Instead, ‘ the Muslims hesitated to assume that natural processes were conducted according to certain principles’. For Muslims, ‘there was a continuous interference of God, and of supernatural forces in nature … hence a kind of intellectual stupor’; Sayili, op. cit. (5), 22. 7 Following this mistaken approach S. H. Nasr, for instance, divides the scientific schools of Islamic philosophy into two dominating trends. One was the Hermetic-Pythagorean school, relying upon symbolic interpretations of nature, commonly through mathematics. The second was rationalistic and encyclopedic, and included the likes of Aristotle, Ptolemy and Galen; see Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam, Cambridge, 1987, 33. 8 Between the years 1957 and 1984 Otto Neugebauer, Edward Kennedy, Willy Hartner, Noël Swerdlow and George Saliba, as well as others, managed to determine that the mathematical edifice of Copernican astronomy could not have been built as it was finally built just by using the mathematical information available in such classical Greek mathematical and astronomical works as Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest. See George Saliba, ‘Arabic astronomy and Copernicus’, in idem, A History of Arabic Astronomy : The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 5 instance, instead of treating two separate scientific cultures – Islam and Europe – George Saliba shifted our attention to the universality of scientific activity per se. In exploring the transmission of Islamic astronomy to Europe, he not only extended the field of Islamic natural philosophy into the sixteenth century, but also informed us that innovations in Islamic natural philosophy continued and improved upon those of the late medieval period, reaching into early modern times, and were a direct source for Copernicus. By dealing more with scientific ideas than with their contexts, he has built a Copernicus of universal scientific achievement, not so much a eurocentric Copernicus.9 This was a very valuable revision, yet Saliba, and the majority of historians of Islamic natural philosophy, have emphasized mathematical and logical achievements in particular, and that leaves us with the task of determining just how those achievements occurred within the cultural context of mysticism and other particularities.10 My study is a preliminary account, and its aim is merely to suggest new directions for the cultural history of natural philosophy in the Islamic world. I propose to take Saliba’s argument one step further by, in a sense, stepping back and looking into a tiny corner of the migration of scientific knowledge between Europe and the Islamic world. I hope to show a migration in this case that was relatively unaware of the larger contexts, had no specialized scientific agenda, and was received in a world of arts, letters and learning that was infused with mysticism. To establish a microhistory of the first reference to the Copernican system in Arabic, I must trace the migration of Duret’s book from Paris to Istanbul. In addition, I offer a hypothesis about the identity of the translator, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi. By determining just which Ibrāhı̄m Efendi this was, and what his intellectual predispositions were, we may understand how he read the postCopernican astronomy and how he thought it should be presented in translation, this in turn affecting and being affected by the scientific interests that surrounded him. The first encounter with the Copernican system will, therefore, be presented more as a chance event than as the result of an awareness of the ascendancy of European natural philosophy. Planetary Theories during the Golden Age of Islam, New York, 1994, 291–307; idem, ‘Mediterranean crossings: Islamic science in Renaissance Europe’, paper presented at Stanford University, autumn 1998. Other revisions were made on different grounds. Some argued that the crisis of causality in late nineteenthcentury Western science only shows clearly that Islamic philosophy of science did not lose its pertinence. See C. A. Qadir, Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World, London, 1990; Muhammad R. Mirza and Muhammad Iqbal Siddqi, Muslim Contribution to Science, Lahore, 1986. A. I. Sabra presents the revisions in the field of astronomy, qualifies the ‘ problem of decline’ and argues that it is ‘not the problem of why ‘‘modern science’’ did not happen in the Islamic Middle Ages (in my opinion, not a good question), but of why it weakened instead of going farther than it did, which, unlike the other question, can be investigated empirically ’. As opposed to Saliba, he sees the eleventh century as the golden age of Islamic science. Sabra, ‘ Configuring the universe: aporetic, problem solving, and kinematic modeling as themes of Arabic astronomy’, Perspectives on Science (1998), 6, 35–6. 9 Saliba, ‘Arabic astronomy’, op. cit. (8), 91–307; and idem, ‘ Mediterranean crossings’, op. cit. (8). 10 Here I have to mention David King, who actually alone has discussed the religious and cultural utilities of astronomy (timekeeping). King, Astronomy in the Service of Islam, Aldershot, 1993. On timekeeping in the Ottoman Empire, see D. King, ‘Astronomical timekeeping in Ottoman Turkey’, in Islamic Mathematical Astronomy, London, 1986, 245–69. 6 Avner Ben-Zaken Noël Duret and Richelieu Duret is rarely mentioned in historical accounts or scientific dictionaries,11 and few copies of his New Richelian Ephemerides have survived.12 Curtis Wilson mentions Duret as an anti-Copernican astronomer who was interested in Kepler’s elliptical model as an explanation for the motion of the heavenly bodies without accepting the heliocentric grand scheme.13 Duret’s New Richelian Ephemerides gained only little attention. One of the few places mentioning Duret was a letter sent to the Royal Society of London dated 24 July 1675, in which the writer, Flamsteed, complained that Duret instrumentally accepted only the numbers and the technicalities of Kepler’s astronomy without its heliocentric premise.14 Although Duret was responsible for the editions of the Rudolphine Tables, during the seventeenth century, as well as today, The New Richelian Ephemerides and its author appear to have been insignificant and largely unknown in the realm of astronomy. While Duret and his book were on the margins of astronomy, we can find references to them. In 1651, fourteen years after the publication of The New Richelian Ephemerides, Nicholas Culpeper, an English writer on astrology, medicine and herbs, published Semiotica Uranica, a book that dealt mainly with astrology and medicine.15 11 Biographie universelle : Ancienne et moderne, vol. 12, 100, says that he ‘taught mathematics in Paris, and published a few books, none of which met with any real success’. Jérôme de la Lande, Bibiographie astronomique: Avec l’Histoire de l’astronomie depuis 1781 jusqu’à 1802, Paris, 1803, 205, 206, 208, 210, 212, 224, mentioned Duret (Durret) and three of his works: Primi mobilis doctrina dvabvs partibvs contenta. In priori qvidem rectas circvlo adscriptas, circulorum ac triangulorum affectiones cum exquisitis vbique demonstrationibus complectitur. In posteriori vereorumdem analysin vsumque continet, Paris, 1637; Supplementi tabularum richelienarum pars prima: Supplement des tabels richelienes, Paris, 1639; and Novvelle theorie des planetes. Conforme aux obseruations de Ptolomé, Copernie, Tycho, Lansberge, & autres excellens astronomes, tant anciens que modernes. Avec les tables Richeliennes et Parisiennes, exactement calculés, Paris, 1635. He calls him a ‘professor of sciences and mathematics’ ; Biographie, 206. Although la Lande only mentioned the publications of Duret in passing, he is relevant to our discussion from a different angle. La Lande and Duret intersect in the realm of Arabic science, since la Lande was also one of the first postCopernican European astronomers whose texts were translated into Arabic. Both Duret’s and la Lande’s texts contain overviews of the Copernican system aimed at presenting the concepts in a clear, simple fashion. See Husayn Husani, al-Munajjim al-thāni, Tahdhı̄b al-anām fi ta’rı̄b zı̄j Lalande nam (an Arabic translation, rectified, of La Lande’s astronomical map) (ca. 1850). 12 Some popular books, such as the ‘Song of Songs’, do not survive because what copies were made fell apart after heavy use. But in the case of Duret, his minor place in the historical record, combined with the very small number of extant copies of his book, suggest that there was never a second edition. According to the records of the University of California’s Clark Library, it holds the only extant copy. 13 Curtis Wilson, ‘Kepler’s derivation and elliptical path’, Isis (1968), 59, 22, note 88; Riccioli, in Amagestrum novum, notes that Noël Duret, a maker of ephemerides who had previously followed Landsberg’s tables, was so impressed by Gassendi’s confirmation of the Keplerian prediction that he deserted to the Rudolphine camp. See Curtis Wilson, ‘From Kepler’s law’s, so-called to universal gravitation: empirical factors’, in idem, Astronomy from Kepler to Newton, London, 1989, 100, note 29. 14 See ‘ Mr Flamsteads letter of July 24 1675 to the Publisher, relating to another, printed in Num. 110 of these Tracts, concerning M. Horroxes Lunar System’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1675), 10, 370. 15 Nicholas Culpeper, Semiotica Uranica: Astrological Judgment of Diseases, 4th edn, London, 1671, 13. The connection between medicine and astrology in Islam was made already in the very beginning of the translation movement of Greek philosophy. Few figures of the tenth century who were at the same time translators and physicians in the Abbasid court had written known works like Yuhanna ibn Bahtisu’s Kitāb The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 7 Culpeper and his book were widely known among those connected with the two arts, and Semiotica Uranica circulated in five editions between 1651 and 1671. It set forth two different astrological methods for understanding disease. The first is that of the ‘ Arabian Physician, and Singular astrologer … Abraham Avenezra ’.16 The second method was based on Noël Duret’s work, and he mentions that Duret was ‘ Cosmographer to the King of France, and the most excellent Cardinal the Duke of Richelieu ’.17 In order to gain a fuller understanding of Duret’s work, we must look closely at its title : Novae motuum caelestium ephemerides Richelianae (‘the new Richelian ephemerides of the celestial movement ’). The traces of Cardinal Richelieu are all over the book. From the title, from Culpeper and from the Biographie universelle, it is clear that Duret was a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu, the court cosmographer.18 However, the definition of cosmographer (one who maps general features of the celestial and terrestrial realms) might imply that Duret was not exclusively engaged with astronomy.19 Nothing in the accounts of Richelieu mentions Duret, and yet one salient fact indirectly links them : it is that Richelieu had cultural dealings with the Ottoman Empire. To meet the challenge of France’s natural enemies, the Habsburgs, Richelieu continued France’s tradition of alliance with the Ottomans.20 A long tradition of gift exchange fima yahtagu ilaihi al-tabı̄b min ‘ilm al-nujūm (‘what the physician ought to know about astrology’) (ca. tenth century). See also Yuhanna Ibn al-Salt, Kitab t ibb Nujūmı̄ (‘book of astrological medicine’). Both texts edited by Felix Klein-Franke, Astromathematics in Islam, New York, 1984. An important figure in the long-discredited movement to connect medicine and astrology was the GermanSwiss physician Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541). His medical doctrine was based on analogies between macrocosm and microcosm: human organs were thought to correspond to celestial bodies, e.g. the heart to the Sun. It is also interesting that Hohenheim and his followers preceded Copernicus in emphasizing the centrality of the sun. This may explain the emphasis in Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s Introduction to his translation of Duret, which is translated in part, below in my article, on the interest of the physician-astrologer in the heliocentric system. 16 Culpeper, op. cit. (15), 1. Culpeper’s ‘Avenezra’ was also known as Avraham Ibn-Ezra and was a twelfth-century Jewish hermeneutic scholar of the Bible, as well as a poet, grammarian, traveller, Neoplatonic philosopher, astrologer and astronomer. He was, however, best known as a biblical exegete whose commentaries contributed to the golden age of Spanish Judaism. In his astrological writings he claimed that the Jewish temple and its instruments resembled the cosmos. His commentaries to Exodus 23 : 28 and 33: 21 and to Ecclesiastes 3: 1 and 7: 13 shed important light on his astrological views. On his debate with the Muslim astrologer Abū Ma’shar (Albumasar), see his Otsar Ha-Haim (‘the treasure of life’), p. 45, and on his advocacy of Ptolemaic astronomy and opposition to Ptolemaic astrology see his Sefer Hate’amim (‘the book of reasons’), p. 51. 17 Culpeper, op. cit. (15), 13. 18 Semiotica Uranica and Biographie universelle (xii, 100) both mention Duret as the ‘cosmographer’ of the king and a protégé of Richelieu. 19 Duret was not the only protégé of Richelieu engaged in astronomy and astrology. His colleague Spinelli Davide wrote a historical satiric work dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. It is divided into five dialogues; the last, devoted to astrology and astronomy, includes an astronomical diagram. Davide, Giove appresso gli Etiopi, Venetia, 1633. 20 Already in the late sixteenth century France and the Ottomans had allied to counter the Habsburgs and the Spanish. At that time, the Ottomans established a naval station at the French port of Toulon. See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, Chicago, 1974, 117. It appears that this alliance was not strictly military, and G. R. R. Treasure tells us about Richelieu’s ‘ dream’ of extending Mediterranean trade to the east, as a counterbalance to the rise of the Atlantic trade dominated ˙ 8 Avner Ben-Zaken existed between the Ottoman court and certain European courts, and the objects exchanged were generally related to either natural philosophy or art.21 Rather than being a formal code of conduct, gift-giving was a strategy for success, an external display of power.22 Richelieu established famous collections of art and books.23 A number of Islamic scientific and artistic works were delivered to him at the beginning of the seventeenth century – one Islamic miniature painting and four samples of manuscripts in Arabic.24 In all, Richelieu owned thirty-seven manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian. The man who formed this collection for Richelieu was François Savary de Brèves, who had served as ambassador to Istanbul from 1604 to 1613. On his return,25 de Brèves was promoted to the post of personal advisor to Richelieu, and he by England, Spain and Holland, all enemies of France. Treasure, Cardinal Richelieu and the Development of Absolutism, London, 1972, 210–11. Robert Knecht mentions the great interest that Richelieu had in opening up eastern trade routes for French merchants. For this reason he established personal relations, mediated through envoys (mainly Harlay de Césy), with the Ottoman court. Knecht, Richelieu, London, 1991, 160. 21 Natalie Zemon Davis mentions the exchange of ambassadorial gifts between the French king and the Ottoman sultan and suggests that ‘ Ottoman objects and manuscripts were sought in the west as signs of beauty, curiosity, and wished-for domination’. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Madison, WI, 2000, 126. For samples of list of gifts exchanged between the French and the Ottoman courts see Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660), Paris, 1939, 87, 134 note 2, 165. Carl Burckhardt provides a few examples. Gentile Bellini, whom Signoria of Venice had sent to Istanbul in 1479, made the famous portrait of the Sultan Mehmed II. The son of Mehmed II, Sultan Bayezid II (1481–1512), received a letter containing plans for a windmill, a ship’s pump and a large drawbridge to span the Bosphorus. It was written by Leonardo da Vinci, whom Bayezid II had tried to engage as a bridge-builder in 1506. In 1525 King Francis I of France had sent a letter to Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in which he asked for the Sultan’s help against the Habsburgs; this led to the famous alliance between France and the Ottomans. This alliance, described by Burckhardt as ‘the blasphemous union of the lily and the crescent’, led to the conquest of parts of Hungary by the Ottomans and, most importantly for identifying Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, as we see below, the city of Szigetvar. It was while he was leading the siege of Szigetvar that Süleyman died. In Richelieu’s time Louis XIII was the only European monarch referred by the Ottoman sultans as ‘Padishah’ – the Emperor. See Carl Burckhardt, Richelieu and His Age, 3 vols., London, 1970, ii, 284–95. 22 On gift exchange, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of Theory of Practice (tr. Richard Nice), Cambridge, 1977, 5–6, 38, 109; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘ Beyond the market: books as gifts in sixteenth-century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. V (1983), 33, 69–88; Sharon Kettering, ‘Gift-giving and patronage in early modern France’, French History (1988), 2, 133–51. 23 See Richelieu et le monde de l’esprit, Sorbonne, 1985, items 40, 26, 249, 250, 251. 24 Two of the manuscripts were collections of Sufi poetry by a Dervish Mawlawı̄ named Muhydin Efendi; they were entitled Tuĥfa (‘article of virtue’), and were composed some time around 1595 to 1600. It is noteworthy that many members of the Ottoman court had been drawn from the Sufi Dervish orders, and a number of Dervish poets had positions in court. The second Sufi book was written by Nūr al-Dı̄n Khalı̄lı̄ and entitled Sifat al-‘ ashiqı̄n (‘ felicity of lovers’), composed in 1583. One manuscript was on the science of rhetoric, Jalāl al-Dı̄n Muhammad al-Qazwini’s Talkhı̄ş al-miftāh : al-talkhı̄ş fi ‘ ulūm al-balāghah (‘a key summary: an outline of rhetoric’); this work dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The remaining manuscript attracted my attention more than the others; the title of the book is Kitāb Ta’lı̄m al-Ması̄hı̄ (‘ book of instructions to the Christian’). This book is actually a translation of Richelieu’s own Instruction du chrestien. The translation was made at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Jester de Paussi, the head of the Capuchins of Baghdad. 25 De Brèves was highly appreciated by Richelieu for convincing the Ottoman to issue the proclamation of capitulations that enabled French merchants and Capuchin missionaries to move freely in the Ottoman Empire. See France Treaties, Turkey, 1604, Articles du traité fait entre Henri le Grand, roi de France & de The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 9 Figure 2. Reception of the French Ambassador by Süleyman the Magnificent. The French delegates were greeted ceremoniously, and a parade of the armed forces was arranged in their honour. After being received by the Sultan and allowed to kiss his hand, they exchanged gifts and presented a letter from Francis I, reaffirming the Franco-Ottoman alliance, and urging Süleyman to attack the Habsburgs in Hungary. After Esin Atil (ed.), Süleymanname : The Illustrated History of Süleyman the Magnificent, New York, 1986, 165. also maintained close relations with his successor in Istanbul, Harlay de Césy, who served there until 1640. In his fondness for art, Richelieu never hesitated to call on his subordinates to exploit the apparatus of the absolutist state for his personal benefit. De Brèves used his foothold in Istanbul to procure Islamic pieces and to deliver gifts to the Ottomans in exchange, gifts of artistic, scientific and technological interest. After de Brèves’s death in 1628, de Navarre; & Sultan Amat, empereur des Turcs, en l’année 1604: Par l’entremise de messire François Savary, seigneur de Brèves, conseiller du roi en ses conseils d’état & privé, lors ambassadeur pour sa majesté à la porte dudit empereur. L’empereur Amat fils de l’empereur Mehemet toûjours victorieux, Paris, 1604. In Paris, de Brèves worked on developing a printing press to print Arabic works to sell in the Ottoman Empire. See his entry in Biographie universelle. 10 Avner Ben-Zaken Césy managed the mechanism of gift exchange.26 In the process, he presented to the Ottoman court an example of the intellectual fruits of Richelieu’s court – Duret’s Novae motuum caelestium ephemerides Richelianae. Since we know that Arabic manuscripts were transferred to Richelieu’s library in 1640, it is possible that the exchange of books took place during a window of opportunity between the publication of Duret’s book in 1637 and the death of Richelieu in 1642.27 Duret’s discussion of the Copernican system appears to have gathered dust in the Ottoman court library for twenty years until Ibrāhı̄m Efendi came across it in 1660. If one assumes logical agendas in cultural transmission, then how did Ibrāhı̄m Efendi happen to translate a book that he logically should not even have encountered ? Why did a marginal and rare book become the first source for the reference of the Copernican system in Arabic, instead of, for example, a work of Copernicus himself, or Brahe,28 Galileo or Kepler ? Moreover, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi in fact had to fight to convince the authorities of the utility of translating such a book. Did Ibrāhı̄m Efendi first read Culpeper’s book, which was well known in many regions, including the Ottoman Empire, and then, with the endorsement of that author, seek out the work of Duret to translate it ? There is no evidence to support such a deduction. Perhaps Ibrāhı̄m Efendi was a physician and his interest in astronomy stemmed from that fact – astronomy and the healing arts formed a popular career combination. A biographical dictionary of Arabic writers titled Mu’jam al-mu’allifı̄n mentions one ‘ Ibrāhı̄m Efendi ’, a physician, whose life corresponds with the date of the translation. But given the nature of gift exchanges, as described above, and the collection of books and art, both in France and Istanbul, it is far more likely, in fact I shall argue here, that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi did not look for a book on the Copernican system to translate into Arabic. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s encounter with this rare European book was a result not of an awareness of the rise of the heliocentric system, but of a fortuitous encounter. Once coming into contact with the book, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s approach to translation – his habits of interpretation and philosophical underpinning – was in great part a product of contemporary intellectual and cultural trends and passions in the Islamic world. These trends were completely suited to advancing the techniques and problems, as well as the metaphysics and epistemology, of astronomy. 26 For sources of France–Ottoman gift exchange and the role of de Césy, see Tongas Gèrard, Les Relations de la France avec l’empire ottoman durant la première moitiè du xviie siècle et l’ambassade à Constantinople Philippe de Harlay, Comte de Césy, 1619–1640, Toulouse, 1942. 27 I suspect that the occasion of de Césy’s presenting Duret’s book was a meeting he had with the Sultan in 1638 in which he negotiated in the name of Richelieu for approving passage of Cossack military force through the Ottoman–Hungarian province on their way to attack the Habsburgs from behind. For de Césy papers, see Gérard, op. cit. (26), 35. 28 Nathan Sivin describes how, in China, Copernicanism was presented through the Jesuits’ particular reading of Tycho Sivin, ‘ Copernicus in China’, in Colloquia Copernica II. Etudes sur l’audience de la théorie héliocentrique, Warsaw, 1973, 63–106. Unlike the Jesuits in China, Duret emphasized both Tycho, for his astronomical model, and Kepler, for his astrology, mathematics and mysticism. Hence Copernicanism was mentioned only marginally – through the astronomical lenses of Tycho and the mystical-mathematical lenses of Kepler, and not Copernicanism in and of itself. For an updated account of the new astronomy in China, see also Keizo Hashimoto, Hsű Kuang-Ch’i and Astronomical Reform: The Process of the Chinese Acceptance of Western Astronomy 1629–1635, Osaka, 1988. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 11 Ibrāhı̄m Efendi and his scholarly world I have already mentioned that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci is a name without links to the standard biographical sources. To gain a more nuanced description of him we must develop our own clues. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi is a common proper name. Normally a last name, with a marker referring to a lineage (Ibn or Abu), might give us an indication of origin. In Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s case, the absence of a last name might indicate that he was a convert ; in Islam and Judaism converts usually get the name of the founding father of monotheism, Ibrāhı̄m, or its Hebrew equivalent Avraham. He also may have been named after a patron, for which at that time there were several potential ones. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two grand viziers and one sultan were called Ibrāhı̄m. Another source of affinity, which will be more pertinent to the latter parts of this paper, was Sufi cosmology, in which Abraham was a manifestation of the heart and the knowledge of the cosmos.29 Further, the name Tezkireci was given to those who occupied the position of ‘ certificate-maker ’ within the Ottoman bureaucracy, the official who, under the supervision of the Ra’isu l-kuttab, was responsible for the drafting of certificates or deeds. The Ra’ı̄su l-kuttab, or chancery of the Ottoman imperial council, was for some time occupied with diplomatic correspondence.30 It is possible that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi was recruited by the court through the Devshirme, the Ottoman institution for collecting young Christian men from the Balkans for military and civil service. The ‘ al-Zigetvari ’ portion clearly refers us to eastern Europe. During the midsixteenth century, Francis I urged his Ottoman allies to attack the Habsburgs; Süleyman the Magnificent laid siege on the Hungarian frontier fortress of Szigetvar.31 In 1566, two days after Süleyman’s death, the fortress of Szigetvar was conquered and became the Ottomans’ administrative centre in the Hungarian province. Several decades later, an Ottoman traveller named Evliya Chelebi spent three years exploring Hungary and reported that the new Ottoman rulers had built twenty-five mosques, forty-seven masjid (small mosques), twelve madrasahs (Islamic colleges), sixteen schools and nine khans (inns for merchants) in the area of Pecs, adjacent to Szigetvar.32 Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s background seems to have been connected to the new Hungarian province. Since only Christians attended the Latin schools set up under the Ottoman Empire, it is also reasonable to assume that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi learned Latin during his childhood at a Szigetvar monastery ; only later did the Ottomans recruit him to use his linguistic skills in the court.33 29 See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimension of Islam, Chapel Hill, 1975, 379. 30 See Gustav Bayerle, Pashas, Begs and Effendis: A Historical Dictionary of Titles and Terms in the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, 1977, 38, 126–7, 147. 31 See Burckhardt, op. cit. (21), 288. 32 Evliya Chelebi, Evliya Chelebi’s Book of Travels: Land and People of the Ottoman Empire in the Seventeenth Century (ed. Klaus Kreiser), 3 vols., Leiden, 1988, iii, 56–60. 33 For samples of Hungarians having a career in the Ottoman army and bureaucracy see Pál Fodor, ‘Making a living on the frontiers: volunteers in the sixteenth-century Ottoman army’, and also Gèza Dávid, ‘An Ottoman military career on the Hungarian borders: Kasim Voyvoda, Bey and Pasha’; both articles are published in Gèza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest, Leiden, 2000. 12 Avner Ben-Zaken At first glance, the title Ibrāhı̄m Efendi chose for his translation of Duret seems inaccurate. The title of Duret’s book translates into English as ‘ The new Richeliean ephemerides of the celestial movement ’, but Ibrāhı̄m Efendi called his translation Sajanjal al-aflāk fi ghāyat al-idrāk (‘ the mirror of the celestial sphere and the purpose of apperception ’).34 Why did Ibrāhı̄m Efendi fail to give a literal translation of the title ? Perhaps his was an innocent attempt to write in a mixture of saj’ (rhymed prose) and verse, or it was an attempt to detach Duret’s book from its French context and embed it in an Islamic one. The word sajanjal ( , ‘ mirror ’) does not possess an ancient Arabic etymology and was rarely used in the Arab world.35 Lexicons claim an origin in Byzantine Greek, thus bolstering the deduction that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi was not a native speaker of Arabic and that he learned the language in a madrasah in eastern Europe or Anatolia, where the Byzantine culture’s influence would still have been strong. Mirrors played a central role in the social and cultural life of the Ottoman city. There were decorative mirrors, round mirrors of many faces and the mirrors held by Sufi beggars or begging dervishes so that for a small coin a gentleman could check his appearance.36 All of these contexts for mirrors were most often connected to ideas and allusions of mystic poetry. Mirror symbolism is everywhere in Ottoman mystic poetry too. Any familiarity with this mysticism brings about an encounter with the central conception of the ‘ Hidden Treasure’ (or attributes of God), which can only be known through reflection in the human mind : Adam was the first, and perfect, such mirror. Thus the ‘ Divine Attributes ’ are the hidden thing, the secret concealed in human minds, just as the polished mirror is hidden in a container of felt. Following further the implicit epistemology, these Attributes are hidden in nature only to be reflected by human acts of mystically obtained apperception. Thus ‘ Nature ’, beyond the phenomena, can be referred as subjective constructions of the human mind. 34 The word for ‘purpose’, rendered as ghāyāt in Arabic and in Latin as picatrix, had a special resonance in both cultures. An Arabic book entitled Ghāyat al-hakı̄m (‘the purpose of the wise man’) was allegedly the work of the Muslim Spanish mathematician Abu al-Qāsim Maslama al-Maghı̄tı̄. The book was translated into Latin during the thirteenth century, at the request of King Alfonso I of Castile, and was called Picatrix. Thereafter Arabic and Latin writers frequently mentioned the book, sometimes as a work treating blasphemous magic and sometimes as esoteric wisdom. The book dealt with a number of subjects, including cosmology and astrology. Possibly Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s selection of the word ghāyāt suggested a debt to Ghāyat al-hakı̄m, which he could have read in its more popular Latin version. If so, perhaps Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s interest in Duret’s book was driven by his prior fascination with magic, astrology and cosmology. See the bilingual Arabic–German version, Ghāyat al-hakı̄m wa-ahaqq al-natijatayn bi-aitaqdim: Das Ziel des Weisen, Berlin, 1933. See also David Pingree (ed.), Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghāyatal-Hakim, London, 1986. For recent work see Elizabeth Carnell, ‘Spells, talismans and the stars: varieties of interpersonal magic in Ghayat al-hakim’, dissertation, University of Michigan, 2002. 35 The most authoritative Arabic dictionary, Lisan al-’Arab, does not have an entry for it. 36 For instance, see Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, Manchester, 1979, 59–60. In this novel, based on an autobiographical manuscript of a Christian captive in Istanbul who was serving in the late seventeenth century as a servant of an Ottoman astronomer, we find references to mirrors as not only reflecting physical bodies but also playing an epistemological role of self-reflection. By gazing at the mirror Ottoman scholars were actually searching to know themselves. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 13 In Mesnevı̄, by the great Sufi poet Jalāl al-dı̄n Rūmı̄ (d. 1231), we read, ‘ since the [mirror’s] image of the eight heavens shone forth, the tablet of their hearts had opened to it. One hundred impressions of Highest Heaven, the Sphere of Stars, the Void … But what impression this ? No! the very sight of God. ’37 Rūmı̄’s Mesnevı̄ was such a powerful source of inspiration that much of the mysticism that permeates Ottoman poetry references it in some way.38 There were other artistic connections to mirrors as well. Kātib Chelebi, a seventeenth-century Ottoman scholar who catalogued and surveyed Ottoman literature, could obtain only two entries containing the word sajanjal for placing under the heading ‘ The science of drawing ’. One concerned ‘ the mirror of the spirit and the art of painting wooden boards ’ and the second was on ‘ the mirror of beauty and the painting of His Majesty ’.39 The rest of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s title is familiar-sounding, and suggests that he was acquainted with Islamic studies of astronomy and the philosophy of illumination. The title resembles titles of very well-known, older writings on the sciences of the heavens. For example, the astronomer and illuminist philosopher Qutb al-Dı̄n al-Shı̄rāzı̄ (d. 1311) wrote Nihāyat al-idrāk fi dirāyāt al-aflāk (‘the ultimate perception of the knowledge of the heavenly bodies ’). Shı̄rāzı̄ and others exposed their teacher, Naşı̄r al-Dı̄n al-Tūsı̄ (d. 1274), to illuminist philosophy, and the latter renamed a summary of his main astronomical work Zubdat al-idrāk fi hayāt al-aflāk (‘ the essence of perception of the form [configuration, behaviour] of the celestial sphere ’). Ibrāhı̄m Efendi may have known such books, the titles of which had words that could inspire him, because so many Islamic astronomers at this time read them. But if we look into the deeper context of parallel wordings, we can see that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi actually was a participant in a contemporary trend of natural philosophy. Late in the twelfth century Shihāb al-Dı̄n Suhrawardı̄ (d. 1191), who was then court philosopher of the Ayyubid dynasty, launched his devastating criticism of peripatetic philosophy. Hossein Ziai rightly argues that illuminist philosophy was not a kind of theosophy or mystical philosophy, as Corbin suggested,40 but actually emanated from rigorous logic.41 Suhrawardı̄ argued that existence of a valid mental distinction did not imply the corresponding existence of an actual distinction in concrete things. In other words, such metaphysical entities as ‘ essence ’, ‘ necessity’ and ‘ causality ’ were i’tibārāt ‘ aqlı̄ya ( ), ‘ beings of reason ’. Instead of leaning on ‘ beings of reason ’, Suhrawardı̄ looked for an intuitive–sensual understanding of nature. In this way, astronomy was thought to be a suitable combination of reason and sense. ˙ ˙ 37 See Mevlānā Jelāleddı̄n Rūmı̄, Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology, Austin, TX, 1997, 121. 38 Walter Andrews, a scholar of Ottoman poetry, has stated that ‘in these very particular ways we cannot really know Ottoman poetry without knowing something of Rūmı̄ ’; ibid., 121. 39 See Kātib Chelebi (Hājji Khalı̄fa), Kashf al-zunūn (‘ the disclosure of opinions’), 2 vols., Istanbul, 1943, ii, 980. 40 H. Corbin, Surawardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative, Paris, 1939. 41 See Suhrawardı̄, Hikmat al-ishrāq (‘the philosophy of illumination’) (tr. John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai), Utah, 1999, pp. xi–xliii; Encyclopedia of Islam (ed. E. J. van Donzel), Leiden, 1998, 783. 14 Avner Ben-Zaken Suhrawardı̄’s work does not convey mystical experience, but a rational structure that records rational proofs found after the mystical experience. In Suhrawardı̄ ’s own analogy, rational proof stands to mystical experience as astronomy stands to observation :42 ‘ Just as by beholding sensible things we attain certain knowledge about some of their states and are thereby able to construct valid sciences like astronomy, likewise we observe certain spiritual things and subsequently base divine sciences upon them. ’43 With respect to his intellectual sources, Plato and Hermes, Suhrawardı̄’s emphasis on such concepts as ‘ illumination ’, ‘ radiance ’ and ‘ light ’ was connected to his central role for the Sun. It became the source of the corporeal light by which we trace hidden incorporeal light, and the eternal circular movements of the spheres are the intermediary by which the timeless and unchanging complexity of the incorporeal light is expressed. Suhrawardı̄ lays down two premises : on the one hand, that of the weak constructions of mind and the need for further intuitive perceptions of nature ; on the other hand, the incorporeal light that could be reached by various tools of natural philosophy, specifically idrāk ( ). The latter can mean ‘ perception ’, yet for Suhrawardı̄ it had a more complex philosophical meaning, and thus I call it ‘ apperception’. His main aim was to construct a unified epistemological theory that describes intuitive knowledge in a ‘ scientific’ way. The notion had already been used by Avicenna,44 and later by others, to describe mainly a sensual perception, but Suhrawardı̄ took it one step further. Idrāk is an intuitive mode of cognition, a direct knowledge of something, whether through sensation or intuition. Through apperception, we may not only see the visible movements of the stars, but also may predict, because the forms of events are inscribed in the spheres and are accessible to human beings under special conditions and with special tools. In The Book of Radiance Suhrawardı̄ writes, they (the celestial spheres) possess universal knowledge, know universal laws, and thus know every form and effect that is in this world. When a celestial sphere arrives at a specific point [in its orbit] it becomes cognizant of whatever comes about as a result of achieving that point. In short it comprehends all temporal causes of effects from past to future, as well as the present.45 Suhrawardı̄’s work constituted a new natural philosophy in which the idrāk concept of intuitive perception unifies the practices of acquiring knowledge in mysticism, astrology and astronomy. But Suhrawardı̄ was not the only one who was disturbed about the problem of perception and knowledge. While he himself approached the problems 42 See John Walbridge, The Science of Mystic Lights: Qutb al-Din Shirazi and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy, Cambridge, 1992, 35. 43 Suhrawardı̄, op. cit. (41), 4. 44 For the philosophy of illumination of Avicenna see Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, Leiden, 1988, 115–30; idem, ‘Avicenna’s eastern (‘‘ oriental ’’) philosophy: nature, contents, transmission ’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy: An Historical Journal (2000), 10, 159–80. 45 Sohravardi, The Book of Radiance (tr. Hossein Ziai), California, 1998, 81. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 15 from an illuminist point of view, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, d. after 1041), a natural philosopher, was concerned with optics and the limits of any rational understanding of nature. Like Suhrawardı̄, he advocated sensual–intuitive perception and employed intensively the notion of idrāk. For example, in his work in optics, the concept served to indicate something that lay behind our perception of the physical world and was not confined to the internal features of optical processes or to the organ of sight. Idrāk, to him, was pure sensation.46 Ibn al-Haytham was also one of the first critics of the Ptolemaic model and especially its failure to reconcile the physical world with the planetary model, as in the Ptolemaic equant’s violation of the geometric rule that uniform revolution is measured only from the centres of spheres. Ibn al-Haytham argued that the source of this inconsistency was Ptolemy’s very methodology, which led Ptolemy to depart from his own theory. And since Ptolemy knew this, his excuse on the grounds that it does not affect the observed movements of the planets would be acceptable if one were only to consider that there is a ‘ true ’ nature of the heavens (kunh haqı̄qatihā)47 over and above Ptolemy’s construction of the heavens. For Ibn al-Haytham, the role of idrāk in optics and astronomy was the same – to perceive the ‘ true ’ nature that could not be perceived by reason or senses. For him, Ptolemy erred by failing to utilize perception by pure sensation, or idrāk. The most important followers of Suhrawardı̄ and Ibn al-Haytham were al-Tūsı̄ and Qutb al-Dı̄n Shı̄rāzı̄ – members of the Marāgha observatory.48 Shı̄rāzı̄’s commentary on Suhrawardı̄’s writings became the vehicle through which the philosophy of illumination was later understood. For the Marāgha school, the main problem was the physical and mathematical disharmonies in the Ptolemaic system, and Shı̄rāzı̄’s investigations provided a non-Ptolemaic model for uniform circular movement. The breakthrough accomplished in the astronomical enquiries of al-Tūsı̄ and Shı̄rāzı̄ was to use Suhrawardı̄’s idrāk as a methodological framework ; scholars now expected a unification of observed data with their physical and mathematical models, something that would in fact be partially achieved later, in fourteenth-century astronomy, by Ibn-Shātir, who got rid of the equant in his model for the Moon. It is necessary to emphasize at this point that idrāk did not remain only as a metaphysical notion in Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s scholarly world of astronomers and natural philosophers. It also dealt with the practice of acquiring perfect, unified knowledge and was connected with rituals of self-development. Rūmı̄ and other Sufi poets and philosophers, like Ibn Al-‘ Arabı̄, claimed the need for obtaining and cultivating an absolute consciousness that could achieve so-called waĥdat al-wujūd, the unity of existence. Thus idrāk became a means and illumination became the purpose in unveiling the unity of existence. Because in Sufism the theory of knowledge is meant to merge the believer ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ 46 See A. I. Sabra, Optics, Astronomy and Logic: Studies in Arabic Science and Philosophy, Brookfield, 1994, 130–40. 47 See Ibn al-Haytham, al-Shukūk ‘ alā Bat lamyūs (Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum; Aporias against Ptolemy) (ed. A. I. Sabra and N. Shehaby), Cairo, 1971, 39. 48 See Walbridge, op. cit. (42). ˙ 16 Avner Ben-Zaken with God, refined perception (idrāk) was, therefore, accompanied by the rituals dhikr (recollecting, repetition of divine names or religious formulae), ta’ammul (meditation), tafakkur (pondering) and tawajjuh (strong concentration of master and disciple on each other). The practitioner would elevate his spiritual experience and ‘ clean ’ the mirror of his heart to a level at which God ‘ lifts the curtain ’ and ‘ unveils ’ the heavens.49 Rūmı̄’s Mesnevı̄ had already been a lyric command in this regard: ‘ Show me things as they really are. Man is a mighty volume; within him all things are written, but veils and darknesses do not allow him to read that knowledge within himself. ’50 To paraphrase Ashworth, such things as idrāk, illumination, mirrors, astrology, radiance and hermeticism make up ‘ the Islamic emblematic world ’. Each of them constitutes in the mirror of the heart the reflection of the ‘ true ’ heavens. Idrāk made an impact in areas of knowledge and specialization that were allied with astronomy. Taqı̄ al-Dı̄n (d. 1585), the chief astronomer of the Ottoman observatory, was also well known as a mechanic specializing in clocks for a variety of uses. In his introduction to a treatise on astronomical clocks and their application to observation, he claimed, using Hermes as a source of inspiration, that the advantages were in bringing about a true, hermetic and distilled perception of the motion of the heavenly bodies.51 He placed a condition on those who would imitate the instrument : they needed to have the power of idrāk in order to be able to set and measure the motions.52 Sufism carried forward and perpetuated the ideals of idrāk, illuminationism and the mirror motif in seventeenth-century Ottoman art and architecture aided by its strong social position. Sufi religious orders (tarı̄qa) imposed hierarchal structures on social groups, from sheikhs to dervishes and sympathizers. Ottoman sultans seeking hegemony over Anatolia relied on the Sufi orders for support in consolidating newly acquired territory. In return the orders received gifts of land and endowments for lodges (called zāwiya), in which members of the orders practised rituals and taught the unity of existence through apperception. These lodges, built upon centralized, harmonious spaces, created in turn certain harmonious atmospheres. There, from the sixteenth century onwards, Sufis and students practiced a special style of calligraphy that used mirror reflection motifs that expressed holistic perception.53 49 There are many different versions of these Sufi practices. For the limited scope of this paper it is noteworthy that the Turkish and Persian mystical poetry of the late medieval period emphasized the practice of dhikr qalbı̄ (recollection for distilling the heart) by which the pure mirror reflects the heavens and God, an act that symbolized the mergence of the believer with God and nature. See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimension of Islam, Chapel Hill, 1975, 169–75, 188–90, 228. 50 A. J. Arberry, Discourses of Rumi, London, 1961, 62–3. 51 See Taqı̄ al-Dı̄n, Al-Kawākib al-daurı̄yya fi bankāmāt al-daurı̄ya (‘the revolving stars concerning the revolving clocks’), Cairo, Dar al-Kutub, Mikat, nr. 557/1, p. L.4a. For a printed commentary (although not precise in translation) see also Sevim Tekeli, 16’inci Asidra Osmanlilarda Saat ve Takiyuddin’in ‘ Mekanik Saat Konstruksuyonuna Dair En Parlak Yidislar Adli Eseri’ (‘clocks in the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century, and Taqı̄ al-Dı̄n’s ‘‘The brightest stars for the construction of mechanical clocks’’’), Ankara, 1966. 52 Taqı̄ al-Dı̄n, op. cit. (51), L.4a. 53 Annemarie Schimmel, ‘Calligraphy and sufism in Ottoman Turkey’ in The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art, and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey (ed. Raymond Lifchez), California, 1992, 242–53. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 17 Figure 3. In the muthannā, or ‘doubled ’-style calligraphy, shown on the left, each half of the design is a mirror image of the other. The basmallah in the thalūth script, pictured on the right, has been written in the shape of an ostrich. This type of calligraphy is not really a type of script in itself but consists of either a text in one of the standard scripts such as naskhı̄ worked into a pattern in which one half is a mirror image of the other, or in some cases pictorial calligraphy, in which the text (usually the profession of faith, a verse from the Qur’ān, or some other phrase with religious significance) is written in the shape of a bird, animal, tree, boat or other object.54 The act of reading usually involves identifying the words (sensory and cognitive act) and grasping the meaning (an act of reason) that is delivered in the words. It was thought that in order to understand the muthannā calligraphic forms, one needed an additional holistic intuitive perception (idrāk). The loftiest governmental circles and the centres of astronomical activities were infused with Sufism.55 For example, we see below that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi presented his translation to the munajjim bāshı̄, or court astrologer-astronomer. The one who held that position beginning in 1667, three years after the publication of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s Sajanjal, was Ahmet munajjim bāshı̄, who was born in Salonika and educated in traditional scholarly subjects, including fı̄q (Islamic law), and scientific ones, mainly astronomy and astrology. But he was also well versed in Sufism, such that, although his name carried the title ‘ chief astronomer ’, he was mainly known to his contemporaries as an outstanding Sufi poet.56 Thus not just natural philosophers and astronomers but also mystics, Sufi dervishes and poets concerned themselves with apperception of nature beyond its phenomena through an absolute consciousness that was to be gained by illuminating sensual–intuitive experience. 54 For samples of different calligraphical forms see Najji Zayn al-Dı̄n Masraf, Badā’i‘ al-khatt al-‘Arabı̄ (‘the wonders of Arabic calligraphy ’), Baghdad, 1972. 55 The 1650s were characterized by political and cultural turmoil in Istanbul that was derived mainly from the inner struggle between the different Sufi orders and to some extent between them and the orthodox clergy. See Derin Terzioğlu, ‘ Sufi and dissident in the Ottoman Empire: Niyāzı̄-i mişrı̄ ’, dissertation, Harvard University, 1999, 190–277. 56 Mehmed Sureyya (ed.), Sicill-i Osmani, 6 vols., Istanbul, 1996, ii, 287. Avner Ben-Zaken 18 I do not suggest here merely a structural connection between various concepts, but a factual personal connection or, to follow Collins’s proposal, a ‘ cluster of intellectuals ’.57 Al-Shı̄rāzı̄’s commentary was the main vehicle of Suhrawardı̄ thought ; al-Tūsı̄ was familiar with Suhrawardı̄ through his own student Shı̄rāzı̄ and through other sources ;58 and Shı̄rāzı̄ was personally acquainted with Rūmı̄.59 Al-Tūsı̄, al-Shı̄rāzı̄ and Ibrāhı̄m Efendi were inspired by and acted within a current theory of knowledge. It was no coincidence that they all used the term idrāk in the titles of writings. Alternatives were available: for example arşād ( ) stood for observations, a basic part of their practice of astronomy. But in their works idrāk (‘ the essence of idrāk ’, ‘ the ends of [ultimate] idrāk ’ and Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s title ‘ the purpose of idrāk ’) described the more fundamental philosophical action of apperception. In their scientific practices ˙ ˙ 57 Collins presented an illuminating diagram representing the actual connections between mystics, scientist and logicians in late medieval Islamic natural philosophy, in which most of the central philosophers were somehow in connection with illuminist philosophy or mysticism. See Randle Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge, 1998, Figure 8.3, 424. See also Abbās Muĥammad Ĥasan Sulaymān (ed.), Zubdat al-idrāk fi hay’at al-aflāk : ma’a dirāsah li-manhaj al-T ūşı̄ al-’ilmi fi majāl al-falak, al-Iskandariyyah, 1994. 58 I am trying to show that the most prominent astronomer, al-Tūsı̄, who has been discussed by historians of Islamic science mainly for his astronomy and mathematics, was actually an intellectual and philosopher with much wider scope. Astronomy was for him only one part of a bigger project to acquire unified knowledge. Hence I argue that he was aware of the shortcoming of perception by reason or senses and looked for other kinds of perception (intuitive) that would fill the holes. He had a direct knowledge of Suhrawardı̄’s philosophy, which was a source of both science and prose. In some of his works, al-Tūsı̄ persianized the Arabic prose by assimilating it into an eloquent and fluent Persian diction, following the model of Suhrawardı̄. See Hamid Dabashi, ‘ Khawājah Naşı̄r al-Dı̄n al-T ūsı̄: the philosopher/vizier and the intellectual climate of his time’, in History of Islamic Philosophy (ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman), 2 vols., New York, 1996, i, 239. Muhammad Mu’in, ‘Naşı̄r al-Dı̄n al-Tūsı̄ wa zabān wa adab pārsı̄’, Majalla yi Danishkada-yi adabiyyāt (1956), 3 (4), 30–42. In his commentary on Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt wa al-tanbı̄hāt, al-Tūsı̄’s principal concern is to elucidate Avicenna’s philosophy and defend it. However, he occasionally takes issue with Avicenna and prefers the positions of Suhrawardı̄. The questions of ultimate knowledge and the ways to acquire it were intertwined in al-Tūsı̄’s writings. In his autobiography, Sayr wa sulūk (‘contemplation and action’), he approached the problem through Avicennian lenses. Perfect knowledge is the knowing of a thing in which essence and existence, or potentiality and actuality, overlap – God. In nature the two are divided and, therefore, the apperception of the natural motion from potential to actual would end in absolute knowledge. The way to acquire it is not only by spiritual or physical knowledge, but by the combination of the two. See Sayr wa sulūk (ed. and tr. S. J. Badakhchani), London, 1998, 25, 26, 29, 42, 43. Al-Tūsı̄ had other channels that exposed him to the philosophy of illumination. In a correspondence he had with the mystical philosopher al-Qūnawı̄, who looked to Suhrawardı̄ as one of his intellectual sources, al-Tūsı̄ expressed his understanding of the concept of idrāk and its connection to the science of astronomy. Once again he looks at the motion from potentiality to actuality as the ultimate understanding of nature. Since this change occurs within the dimension of time – time being measured and determined by the motion of the celestial bodies – the attainment of the ultimate knowledge would be through apperception of the souls of the stars and the interaction of the stars with the active intellect, which both move the celestial bodies. Hence the idrāk aims to attain the sources as well as the ways by which celestial bodies move – the ultimate perfect knowledge. See al-Murāsalāt bayna Sadr al-Dı̄n al-Qaūnawı̄ wa-Naşı̄r al-Dı̄n al-T ūşı̄: tahqı̄q wa-mulakhkhas al-Almāni mufassar kudrun shubart, Beirut, 1995, 107–8, 112, 116–17. Therefore I would argue, differently from F. J. Ragep, that al-Tūsı̄’s other fields of knowledge had a profound connection with his rational, mathematical astronomy. Ragep, Naşı̄r al-Dı̄n al-Tūşı̄’s Memoir on Astronomy (al-Tadhkirat fi ‘ilm al-hay’a), NN vols., Springer-Verlag, 1993, i, 9–23. 59 On an anecdote of a meeting between the famous Sufi poet Rūmı̄ and Shı̄rāzı̄ the illuminist philosopher and astronomer, see Walbridge, op. cit. (42), 14–15. ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 19 they were not only engaged in observations and mathematical models, but also in mystical practices aimed at refining their consciousnesses. More than merely solving mathematical and physical inconsistencies in the Ptolemaic system, they sought a new harmony of the scholar and his universe – a human mirror of God’s universe that uses the hermetic skill of apperception. As mentioned earlier, the theory of knowledge was accompanied by practices. Moreover, theory and practice also had implications, not only for epistemology but for the intellectual culture as well. It is worthwhile pondering other sorts of link between fellow scholars and officials at court and in high-profile observatories. Not only did the men just mentioned seek to reconcile epistemological inconsistencies from out of their passions about the act of perceiving nature, but from evidence farther east in the Islamic world we see that an unintended consequence of all this was the bonds of trust among working colleagues in similar scholarly contexts. We have a letter written by Ghiyāth al-Dı̄n Jamshı̄d al-Kāshı̄, a mathematician and member of the fifteenth-century Samarkand observatory, in which he describes the politics, culture and practices that formed the backdrop of the astronomical texts produced in Samarkand. In it he laments the lack of wholeness in the learning and skills associated with theoretical and practical astronomy. For him the division of labour between model-builders, calculators, observers, instrument-builders, astrologers and mathematicians was not for the sake of efficiency but a reflection of fragmented knowledge.60 As a result, for him mutual scientific trust was not strong. Because the Sufi believer was a pure seeker for the truth who wanted to acquire unified knowledge of unified nature and not to advance his social status, he was perceived by al-Kāshı̄ as more trustworthy than others. Through this fascinating glimpse we can see that Sufis’ passion for amalgamated knowledge not only concerned the human mirror and the act of idrāk, but also included trust. In the same vein we have the quintessential Ottoman intellectual of the seventeenth century – Kātib Chelebi, an explicit follower of Suhrawardı̄.61 Besides his work at cataloguing, he also undertook to reconcile the conflicts between theology and philosophy and between rationalism and mysticism by following Suhrawardı̄’s theory of knowledge : in order to reach the heights of study and investigation scholars should not ‘ confine themselves to one branch of knowledge ’.62 Moreover, Chelebi took a step further and set forth principles for an appropriate intellectual culture and suggested that the ‘ sincere ’ striving for unified knowledge should not only be a matter of the knower and the known, but should also be applied to the practices of trust between scholars. For him someone who sincerely looked for knowledge would be less argumentative and divided in his thinking, and he provided advice on how to practice a 60 See Aydin Sayili (ed.), Uluğ Bey Ve Semarkanddeki Ilim Faaliyeti Hakkinda Giyasű ddin Kāşi’nin Mektubu (‘Ghiyāth al-Dı̄n al-Kāshı̄’s letter on Ulugh Bey and the scientific activity in Samarkand’), Ankara, 1960, 107. 61 See Kātib Chelebi, Sullam al-usūl ilā tabakāt al-fuhūl (Suleymaniye Library, Shehid Ali Pasha Section nu. 1887), p. 271a. 62 See Kātib Chelebi, Mı̄zān al-haqq (The Balance of Truth), (tr. G. L. Lewis), London, 1957, 25. 20 Avner Ben-Zaken Figure 4. Ottoman astronomers in action. The main building of the observatory had a huge armillary sphere, supported on a wooden frame. The man in the middle is using a plumb-bob to adjust the position of the meridian (north–south) circle, which we see almost edge on. After ’Alā al-Dı̄n al-Manşūr, Shahinshāhnāma (Istanbul University, F 1404). trustworthy scientific activity.63 Thus the mystical trend of knowledge for the sake of knowledge became a pillar of trust among astronomers. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s translation By establishing cultural and intellectual sources in Sufi cosmological poetry and illuminist natural philosophy, we can make some intelligent guesses as to why Ibrāhı̄m Efendi chose to translate Duret’s astrological writing, and why he appropriated it to the scientific and philosophical traditions of post-Avicenna philosophy. An analysis of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s translation will take us beyond the not too useful ‘ occult/scientific’, 63 Kātib Chelebi, op. cit. (62), 35–55. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 21 ‘ astrology/astronomy ’ and ‘ mysticism/logic ’ dichotomies. We are instead reading a text that was based in a consistent, and current, natural philosophy meant to overcome logical and scientific aporia by practices aimed at establishing a harmonious union with all of physical and godly existence. Sajanjal al-aflāk fi ghāyat al-idrāk is divided into two parts : the translation proper and, more important to us, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s introduction. Though the content of Duret’s book was predominantly astrological and the Copernican system was relegated to a minor position in it, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s introduction makes little mention of astrology (apart from an astrological diagram) and, instead, amounts to Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s own reading of the history of astronomy. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi states that he found Duret’s book and independently elected to translate it into Arabic ; only after having completed the project did he show it to the munajjim bāshı̄ (or the sultan’s chief astronomer/astrologer) Mehemet Chelebi.64 At first Mehemet Chelebi did not approve of it, stating, ‘ Europeans have many vanities similar to this one. ’ But when Ibrāhı̄m Efendi prepared an almanac based on Duret’s tables, the munajjim bāshı̄ saw that it conformed to the authoritative tables prepared by the Muslim astronomer Ulugh Beg and grew convinced of the value of the French work. He had a copy made for himself and bestowed upon the translator a benefaction. The lengths to which Ibrāhı̄m Efendi went to convince Mehemet Chelebi of the value of Duret’s book suggest that the court astronomer was firm in his prejudice but also appreciative of sheer utility. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s introduction traced astronomy from the Greeks through the Muslims and then to Copernicus. He noted the methodological shortcomings of ancient astronomy based on observation : the improvement of the Muslims came about ‘ by means of the zı̄j ’,65 that is, the azyāj school of computational astronomy. It was the first phase of testing Ptolemaic data by conceiving, organizing and executing new series of observations (arşād); the second phase, which involved questions of planetary configuration, was called hay’a. The emphasis that characterized the hay’a school’s newly conceived problem-solving programme was primarily theoretical rather than empirical ; the programme consisted in seeking, or urging to seek, a reconciliation between the Ptolemaic ‘ mathematical ’ hypotheses assumed to be already supported by observational tests and the theories of cosmology, physics and natural philosophy. Sabra has suggested that this school perceived an existence of ‘ true ’ (sahı̄h ) configurations that were in harmony with the accepted principles of physics.66 Ibrāhı̄m Efendi claimed that the source for the progress in Muslim astronomy was its quest for a more harmonized system that would reconcile the physical with the mathematical. 64 In the Ottoman court, the munajjim bāshı̄ was responsible for drawing up the horoscope for court activities and policies. Grammatically, the term is the active participle of najjama, ‘to observe the stars and deduce from them the state of the world’. For a long time the term as a noun designated both astrologer and astronomer, so close were the functions of the two. Astrology was also called ’Ilm al-ahkām. 65 Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, Sajanjal al-aflāk fi ghāyat al-idrāk, Istanbul, 1664; Kandilli Rasthanesi no. 403. I chose to rely on Ihsanoglu’s translation of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s Introduction since after reviewing the original text I had only few qualifications that were expressed in a modified text I present here. See Ihsanouglu, ‘Introduction of western science to the Ottoman world’, op. cit. (1), 71–2, 84. 66 Sabra, ‘Configuring the universe’, op. cit. (8), 13. 22 Avner Ben-Zaken It is important to mention that as the Arabs took over the mantle of astronomy from the Greeks in Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s narrative, no mention is made of the different religious and ethnic backgrounds of the astronomers. Ihsanoglu’s translation of the introduction of the treatise shows us that for Ibrāhı̄m Efendi the astronomers existed as cosmopolitan individuals and not as representatives of either one’s own or foreign cultures : In 1461 Peuerbach and Regiomontanus found mistakes in Alfonso’s tables. Although Regiomontanus had initiated his observations in order to correct the zı̄j, he did not live long enough to finish his work. A few years later Nicholas Copernicus, who was a very successful and superior scholar, discovered the mistakes in Alfonso’s tables and, realizing that the foundations for the tables were unsound, formulated a new solution in 1525.67 He did so by relying on the observations astronomers had made throughout the ages. The defect in question was the following: the eighth sphere moves with the ninth sphere by an oscillatory motion (raqqāsiyya) of 40,900 years. This motion is equal to two small circles moving from West to East in the depth of the ninth sphere. This situation is against the observation of the majority. Later, Copernicus laid a new foundation and compiled a small ephemeris supposing that the Earth is in motion. This ephemeris was used thereafter until Tycho Brahe made observations with numerous excellent instruments and began to correct the ephemeris of Copernicus. Relying on his observations, he also wrote the ephemerides of the Sun, the Moon, and the fixed stars. … Afterwards, the scholar Kepler compiled an ephemeris for all stars based on Tycho’s observations, and named it the Rudolfine Tables. … The eclipses of the Sun and the Moon did not conform to this ephemeris … later I, Ibrāhı̄m Sgizetvari, known as Tezkireci, translated the ephemeris which the scholar Duret compiled after thirty years of observation based on the ephemeris of Lansberg. The ephemeris was based on observation according to the longitude of Paris. It was compiled by benefiting from the old Julian and the new Gregorian calendar as well, accepting the Earth as motionless.68 Here the history of natural philosophy is a chain of knowledge transmitted from one scholar to another, from one generation to another, smoothly and continuously. Therefore there was no revolution in either of these periods; it was only an evolution of knowledge. However, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi does seem to have been aware of the disagreements between the heliocentric system of Copernicus and those of his predecessors and of Tycho, and his annotated diagram presented such differences. Yet he did not take a clear stance as to which system convinced him most. Duret himself supported the argument that Earth is motionless, and thus we assume that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi too was not convinced by the Copernican system. But we must note at this point that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi did not read Copernicus directly, only through the mediation of Duret. Duret and Ibrāhı̄m Efendi refer to a writing of Copernicus from 1525, which is closer in time to the Commentariolus than to the De Revolutionibus, works that reflect the varying motives of Copernicus. The discussions in our own time over the motives behind these two works might possibly provide clues 67 He mentioned a work by Copernicus from 1525, which is a mistaken date. We know that some time between 1507 and 1515 Copernicus completed a short astronomical draft essay, De Hypothesibus Motuum Coelestium a se Constitutis Commentariolus (known as the Commentariolus), which was not published until the nineteenth century. Not until 1530 did Copernicus seriously begin work on De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (‘ on the revolutions of the celestial spheres’), which was finished by a pupil eager to see the work in print. It eventually was first published by a Lutheran printer in Nuremberg, just before Copernicus’s death in 1543. 68 Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, op. cit. (65), 71–2. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 23 Figure 5. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s diagram of the world system. Shown along with its companion astronomical tables, at the left. After Figure 1, in Ihsanoglu, ‘Introduction of Western Science to the Ottoman World ’, in Transfer of Modern Science and Technology to the Muslim World (ed. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu), Istanbul, 1992. See also Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s original Sajanjal al-Aflāk fi Ghāyat al-Idrāk, Istanbul, 1664 ; Kandilli Rasthanesi, no. 403. for the direction in which to seek Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s approach to post-Copernican astronomy. Some, like Kuhn, relying on the De Revolutionibus, have felt that Copernicus worked to eliminate mathematical contradictions and improve overall harmony through geometrical aesthetics ;69 others, like Swerdlow, who relied on the Commentariolus, have felt that the astronomer sought answers to physical and philosophical problems 69 Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Cambridge, 1956, 184. 24 Avner Ben-Zaken surrounding the celestial spheres themselves, and that he had intellectual roots in fact in the Marāgha school and especially al-Tūsı̄ and Ibn Shātir.70 One might first assume that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi did not follow predictably in the footsteps of Marāgha. He chose instead to present the problem differently, namely as questions about the eighth and ninth spheres, as seen in the extract given above, taken from his Introduction. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi mentions neither the heliocentric nor the equantless features in Copernicus’s model but focuses on the question of values for the movement of trepidation and precession.71 In developing his take on Copernicus, as it were, we cannot expect Ibrāhı̄m Efendi to have followed an intellectual pattern or a historical motive as we today have interpreted those to be. But if we are to accept my previous argument, that the real implication of the Marāgha school’s interest in Ptolemaic physical and mathematical inconsistencies was its search for harmony, then we can say that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s interest in geometrically harmonizing trepidation and precession did indeed follow in their footsteps. I believe that the matter of the spheres represents his reading of Duret, who in turn also read and extracted ideas indirectly – not necessarily only from Copernicus’s writing, but from secondary sources of the late sixteenth century. As mentioned, his book emphasizes the role of post-Copernican astronomers like Tycho, Landsberg and especially Kepler, and neglects Copernicus himself for, I assume, censorship reasons. Robert Westman has dealt with these secondary sources for Copernicus,72 and has tried to do away with any so-called division between Copernicans and anti-Copernicans in the period when the Copernican system was first received. He argues that the process in that time, especially in the Wittenberg circles, was elastic: astronomers like Reinhold and Precuer did not accept the premise that the Earth is in motion, but they did accept and use Copernican mathematical devices. On the other hand, astronomers like Rheticus accepted the moving-Earth premise not for the mathematical devices, but for the purpose of reconciling inner conflicts and bringing together a harmonious universal whole. Just this kind of elasticity exists in the case of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi. He situated the problems in astronomy in the technical arena of Ptolemaic discrepancies, as did many of his predecessors, but in fact he mainly presented the motives of Copernicus as a problem of aesthetics, just as Kuhn suggested. The reason for his doing so may very well have been due to the way he received his Copernicus. Based on the extant text of Duret, it is possible to suggest that in reading Duret, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi was imbibing the latter’s understanding of Copernicus via Rheticus’s De Narratio. Moreover, it has been our whole point up to now to see how very broad was the appeal to Ibrāhı̄m Efendi of the aesthetic explanations regarding harmony found in holistic, illuminist Sufism and the culture in which it was embedded. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s epistemological elasticity and his ˙ ˙ 70 Noël Swerdlow, ‘The derivation and first draft of Copernicus’s planetary theory: a translation of the Commentariolus with commentary’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1973), 117, 423–512. For the historiographical debate, see Robert Westman, ‘ Two cultures or one’, Isis (1994), 85, 90–3. 71 Some drew connections between Copernicus and Thābit Ibn-Qurrā (d. 901), the man who posed the notion of trepidation. See Kristian P. Moesgaard, ‘Thābit Ibn-Qurrā between Ptolemy and Copernicus’, in Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Avet, Avec, Après Copernic : La Représentation de I’univers et ses conséquences épistémologiques, Paris, 1975, 67–70. 72 Robert Westman, ‘The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg interpretation of the Copernican theory’, Isis (1975), 66, 27. The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 25 aesthetic take on post-Copernican astronomy can also be thought of in the manner suggested by Westman regarding Rheticus – a way to reconcile inner conflicts of a Hungarian convert in the service of the Ottomans. As an aside, then, I propose to revise the arguments of Swerdlow, Saliba and others and to say that the Marāgha school was interested not only in physical and mathematical inconsistencies, but also (maybe mainly) in the questions of harmony, and that is why the school was engaged with illuminist philosophy and mysticism. The utility and appeal of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s work Ibrāhı̄m Efendi tells us about the practical accomplishments brought about in translating Duret: I worked out all the mean positions of (Duret’s) ephemeris again according to the evidence and rearranged its shape on the same longitude. I expounded it in Arabic. This ephemeris (his own development) was sexagesimal and its mean positions were universal ; I arranged it according to the constellations of the zodiac. I turned the tables into an ephemeris hitherto unseen in shape and brevity, entitled it Sajanjal al-aflāk fi ghāyat al-idrāk … I also compiled a work concerning universal calendar which came out to be more graceful and succinct than all calendars.73 Since the growing number of astronomical tables created divergent and incompatible figures for the position of the heavenly bodies and the latitudes of cities, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi compared the numbers in different, Islamic and European, astronomical tables and calculated their average as the accepted numbers. Instead of an isolated, or singular, use of specific observational data, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s treatment suggests a holistic and conforming perception (or an apperception, idrāk) of the locations of the heavenly bodies. Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s adjustment of the imported New Richelian Ephemerides to Ottoman practice of astronomy actually followed the astronomical genre of the Islamic world known as azyāj, a record of observations whose purpose was specifically to update the zı̄j. Over centuries of updating, it was shown that the Ptolemaic values of precession and procession – solar apogee, solar equation, inclination of the ecliptic and all Ptolemy’s mean motions – were no longer acceptable. But most important for my discussion is that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s universal and holistic treatment reflects his illuminist and mystical background : he avoided certainty and any clear notion of causality by looking for a universal and unified understanding of nature. Moreover, the arrangement of the ephemeris according to the constellations of the zodiac linked the work to astrology. Yet, in the same way that the heliocentric system at first was rejected and disregarded in Europe, the Ottoman scientific authority disdained Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s presentation of Duret’s post-Copernican astronomy. As we have seen, initially the munajjim bāshı̄ rejected the book as ‘ European vanities’ ; only after Ibrāhı̄m Efendi convinced him that the book agreed with the prevailing ephemeris of the Islamic world did he give his blessing to the translation and said, ‘ You have erased my suspicions ; now I have full confidence in the ephemeris prepared by Europeans. ’ 73 Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, op. cit. (65), 72. 26 Avner Ben-Zaken Figure 6. Astrological tables in Duret’s Latin original and Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s translation. The table on the left from Duret’s original shows the longitudes and latitudes of a usual variety of European, New World and Asian cities. By translating this list into Arabic (Ottoman Turkish) Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, however, is breaking with traditional Islamic technical works that were parochial in their geographical outlook. For example, the tenth city on Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s list (see right) is Stockholm, which would not have been found in traditional Islamic tables and suggests an openness towards a sense of universality. Why did the chief astronomer resist the translation of new research ? After all, was this sort of knowledge-gathering not part of his job ? It was because of the utilitarian ends to which Duret’s book could be applied. The scientific environment surrounding Ibrāhı̄m Efendi was not interested just in theoretical astronomy. In fact, astronomy and astrology both possessed a utilitarian character in the Ottoman context. Astronomers of local mosques used the ephemeris for timekeeping, and astrologers used it to draw up horoscopes. With these ideas in mind, we may deduce, however leaning towards conjecture it may be, that the illuminist philosophy and mysticism in Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s intellectual make-up inspired him to pick Duret’s book from the court library and to translate it, but its astrological utility won over the munajjim bāshı̄. Conclusion In 1637 Richelieu’s ‘ cosmographer ’, Noël Duret, published a book that dealt with astrology and astronomy ; in it he mentioned the Copernican system. Some time The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart 27 between 1637 and 1642, thanks to Richelieu’s fondness for art and scholarship, the book was delivered by Harlay de Césy to Istanbul in exchange for Arabic and Persian manuscripts that were sent to Paris. The New Richelian Ephemerides lay on the shelves of the court library for twenty years until a Latin-educated Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrāhı̄m Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci, ran across it. Inspired by Sufism, illuminist philosophy and astrology he showed the munajjim bāshı̄ his translation of it. The munajjim bāshı̄ gave his approval only when he was convinced of a utilitarian astrological usage for the astronomical maps. This narrative about a Parisian publication and its translator in Istanbul raises questions regarding the prevailing historiographic view of the period, which was sketched above. The widely held version of the decline and stagnation in Islamic natural philosophy due to Ghazzalian and illuminationist philosophies cannot fit the world of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi and Duret. To paraphrase the words of Ashworth, the Islamic ‘ emblematic world view ’, consisting of high mathematization, illuminationism, Sufism and Hermeticism, had manifold dimensions in the history of late medieval Islamic astronomy. It inspired an epistemological search for a harmonious and unitary nature and, more practically, it proposed rituals and practices to gain a refined consciousness that would allow a special apperception (idrāk). Finally, it motivated a search among astronomers for a way to trust each other and their projects, to foster, in the context of their religious passion, ‘ true lovers of truth’ who looked for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Ever since Frances Yates’s account of the hermeticism of Bruno, European historiography of natural philosophy has gone through major revisions in regard to the role of magic, astrology, mysticism or other ‘ emblematic world views ’ in the rise of the early modern natural philosophy. There subsequently arose quite a bit of interest in the ‘ nonscientific’ works of its central figures, including Newton’s theology and alchemy. It makes sense, in this light, to include the kind of intellectual framework of Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, Sufism and idrāk in the same revisionist programme. We have seen that Sufism was not an impediment to scientific activity, but a driving force for further exploration. The nexus of Duret and Ibrāhı̄m Efendi, with its intertwining of astrology and astronomy and of natural philosophy and mysticism, was certainly not exceptional, in either Europe or the Ottoman Empire. We must call into question any historical construction that describes a firm dichotomy between ‘ disenchanted ’ European humanist-scientists, who often used mysticism for the sake of scientific work, and the ‘ enchanted’ Islamic world, which could not overcome its mystical impediments nor even use it for scientific progress. Paris of the seventeenth century was not radically different from Istanbul in its habits of scientific thought and its agendas, or in their contexts. In both places the ‘ emblematic world view ’ had a strong hold and reinforced the urge to explore nature. With Yates in mind, one can suggest that Ibrāhı̄m Efendi’s translation represents Ottoman ‘ non-rational ’ factors, like astrology, that stimulated an interest in postCopernican astronomy. This may also change the historiographical approach to Sufism that holds it responsible for a decline in Islamic natural philosophy. Now we might instead ask, how did Sufism and occultism in fact stimulate new scientific work and drive the reading of post-Copernican astronomy ? 28 Avner Ben-Zaken Islamic astronomers dealt in precision: they updated and reformed Ptolemaic astronomy by new tools of observation, high-quality mechanics, mathematization, new theories of optics and a persistent discussion of Aristotelian physics. However, these were all part of a larger picture of intellectual activity and part of a larger project that was embedded in the culture. Thus the history of Islamic astronomy from the Marāgha school onwards should not be conceived only as a reaction to the Ptolemaic system, but as a reaction against both untrustworthy scholarship and approaches to knowledge and observation that were not harmonized properly. The scholar needed to refine the mirror of his heart, so as to be fit to work in God’s universe. Therefore Islamic natural philosophy worked through mathematical and astronomical triumphs in order to serve hermetic apperception. The latter, though, was not an obstacle, and could serve as a source of inspiration for the translation of the first Arabic text to mention Copernicus.