IBN AL HAYTHAM S ON THE CONFIGURATION OF THE WORLD

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2 ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE EAST Volume 7 IBN AL HAYTHAM S ON THE CONFIGURATION OF THE WORLD

3 Taylor & Francis Taylor Si Francis Group

4 IBN AL HAYTHAM S ON THE CONFIGURATION OF THE WORLD Edited by Y. TZVI LANGERMANN

5 First published in 1990 by Garland Publishing, Inc. This edition first published in 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 1990 Y. Tzvi Langermann All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: (Set) ISBN: (Set) (ebk) ISBN: (Volume 7) (hbk) ISBN: (Volume 7) (ebk) Publisher s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

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10 PREFACE Circumstances allow me to prepare only the briefest of prefaces to this welcome reprint of my book, which appeared in 1990 and is based largely on the dissertation that was approved in The two critical developments directly related to Ibn al-haytham s On the Configuration of the World are Roshdi Rashed s challenge to its authenticity as a work written by the famous Ibn al-haytham, he who wrote the masterpiece on optics and a slew of important writings in the exact sciences and philosophy, and the information available concerning the Latin translations of On the Configuration. Rashed expressed his doubts at the beginning of his Les Mathématiques infinitésimales du IX e au XI e siècle, first published in 1993 (though it appears not to have been released until 1996) by the Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation in London. His contentions spurred A.I. Sabra the late and lamented scholar under whose direction I wrote the dissertation which lies at the heart of this book to publish a two part exercise on Ibn al-haytham and his oeuvre: One Ibn al-haytham or Two? An exercise in reading the biobibliographical sources, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 12 (1998),1-50, and One Ibn al-haytham or Two? Conclusion, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 15 (2002/3), Pages of the first installment discuss the text here published, On the Configuration. On page 100 of the second part, Sabra voices his opinion that Rashed s hypothesis is strained, unnecessary, and raises more questions than it claims to have answered. Rashed replied to Sabra s strictures a few years later in The Configuration of the universe: A book by al-ḥasan ibn al-haytham?" Revue d'histoire des sciences 60 (2007), It seems to me that Professor Rashed s rejection of On the Configuration (the text published in this volume) is intimately connected to his pioneering work on another book by Ibn al-haytham, On the Configuration of the Motions of Each of the Seven Planets. I have never fully fathomed why Ibn al- Haytham could not have written both, as indeed, he authored many works, and expressed different opinions, over the course of his career. His authorship of On the Configuration of the World, about which I have no doubt, does not detract in the least from the splendor of the ingenious innovations which he

11 reveals in the books so brilliantly studied by Rashed (for his study in English see Roshdi Rashed, The celestial kinematics of Ibn al-haytham, Arabic sciences and philosophy 17 (2007), 7-55). Though my research into Ibn al- Haytham s life and works does not even approach the efforts of Professors Sabra and Rashed, I do second my mentor s feeling that the disattribution of the text published here to Ibn al-haytham is unnecessary. In any event, Taro Mimura (recently appointed to a position in history of science at Hiroshima University) has discovered a missing part of On the Configuration of the Motions of Each of the Seven Planets; he informs me by private communication that Rashed s On the Configuration is really part I of a book called Rectification of Astronomical Operations. Mimura s work on that text, some of which, I believe, is being done together with Jamil Ragep, should fairly well put Rashed s arguments in favor of two Ibn al-haytham s to rest. There seems to me no reason doubt that Ibn al-haytham, sāhib al-manāzir, is the author of the On the Configuration of the World. In the dissertation I did little more with the Latin versions than to list the variants I could discern in the materials available to me at the time. Now we have a full study in the as yet unpublished dissertation of Dirk Grupe (written under the direction of Charles Burnett), The Latin Reception of Arabic Astronomy and Cosmology in Mid-Twelfth-Century Antioch: The Liber Mamonis and the Dresden Almagest, University of London, Finally, there are some important additions to the already very long list of Hebrew translations and manuscript copies. A fifth (!) translation into Hebrew, different from the four others previously known to exist, is found in St Petersburg, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy C76, ff. 88a-106b; the author s introduction is lacking but otherwise the text is complete. Moreover, a Hebrew paraphrase of two chapters is found in Moscow, Russian State Library, Ms. Guenzburg 1312, ff. [43]a-[44]b (the brackets indicate that there is no pagination in the manuscript); the chapters are an abbreviated treatment of the ninth orb, and the one on the fixed stars. Other manuscript copies to be added to the list are: St Petersburg, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy B70, ff. 8a-35b (which has particularly well-drawn figures); Rome, Casanatense 3082, ff. 1a-27b; and New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, MS 2625, ff. 1b-32a. Y. Tzvi Langermann Bar Ilan University March 2016

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