At various occasions, reference was often made to societal forces that required new disciplines to be created, as in the case of 'ilm al-mīqāt, 'ilm al-farā'iḍ, and 'ilm al-hay'a, while at other occasions we hinted, again very briefly, to inner logical transformations within the disciplines themselves that gave rise to other disciplines as in the case of the development of trigonometric theory as a result of the need to satisfy solutions of spherical trigonometric nature. The natural consequence of the adoption of the new trigonometry was the demise of the old Greek chord functions, and the old Greek methods of solving spherical trigonometric problems.
At all those occasions this historiographic research was guided by the need to explain the historical and scientific facts as we know them from the extant sources. Again the emphasis was laid on the discipline of astronomy for illustrative purposes only; always hoping that colleagues, who work in other disciplines, would subject the general conclusions, which are reached in the context of the new methodological approach to the history of Islamic science that is adopted with the alternative narrative, to the test of the data they already know from their own particular disciplines. With this approach, it was possible to reconstruct the developments in the discipline of astronomy and to detect, almost at each juncture, the motivations behind most of the new breakthroughs that indeed took place during the long history of Islamic astronomy. Various stages of astronomical thought began to congeal and make much better sense when they were perceived from within this process of contextualization.
On several occasions, reference was made to general trends in the history of Islamic astronomy that were characterized as motivated by religious requirements. The identification of those trends and their twists and turns give hints of the necessarily complicated relationship between science and religion that I hoped to document within the context of the Islamic civilization. I needed to follow that path not only because we needed to know the extent to which certain religious ideas could motivate genuine scientific interest, or to know the role that was played by men of religion in the production of science, but I also needed to know if the prevalent model of antagonism between science and religion that seemed to work relatively well in the European context, as articulated by the ethos of the age of reason, would also work in the context of the Islamic civilization. And here again, there was constant recourse to the discipline of astronomy in order to illustrate the general developments with concrete examples at least from the scientific production of astronomical literature.
While still focusing on the discipline of astronomy, the previous chapter tried to explore the subtle shifts that took place in that discipline. It spoke of those shifts as having occurred, on the one hand, as a result of the mere historical circumstances, like the happenstance of observing the same astronomical phenomena, which were observed by Ptolemy during the second century, from the vantage point of ninth-century Baghdad, thus making use of the accidental passage of about 700 years that could definitely refine the earlier results. On the other hand, it spoke of some shifts that were necessitated by the developments within astronomical thought itself, thereby necessitating the deployment of new mathematical theorems, new mathematical techniques, and finally new perception of the role of mathematics in such disciplines as the astronomical disciplines. The latter realization of the role of mathematics as a descriptive language for natural phenomena could certainly be applied to other scientific disciplines that could either corroborate or negate the processes that seem to have taken place in the astronomical field.
In all instances, much emphasis was placed on the role of the dynamic social, economic and political forces in forging the new conceptions of astronomical processes that finally led to the development of a uniquely conceived Islamic astronomy that was not a mere regurgitation of the older Greek astronomy, nor was it a total break from it, and yet was in a position to lay the foundation for a revolutionary upset of that astronomical tradition. I was careful to note that all those developments, although they were conceived within the societal general context of struggling against the intrusion of the "foreign sciences" into the Islamic civilization, they were at the same time developments that were necessitated by the very shortcomings of the Greek astronomical tradition itself, whether on the practical observational level or on the more advanced theoretical one. But all those developments, twists and turns, were all symptoms of this double tension, which was mentioned earlier, as resulting from a discipline that was forced to negotiate its place within the general accepted epistemological frame of the society on the one hand, and within the general epistemological innovations of the discipline itself on the other.
This chapter will push this discussion a step further by focusing on the repercussions those developments generated, in terms of the new philosophical questions they raised, and will try to revisit the implications of those developments to the relationship between science and religion by using, once more, the illustrative and instructive role of astronomy.
All the theoretical astronomical works that we now know to have been produced in the Islamic civilization between the ninth and sixteenth century were conceived within the general determining parameters of Aristotelian cosmology. With the exception of those treatise that were generally titled al-Hay'a al-sunnīya (probably translatable as Orthodox astronomy)[266] and classified under religious astronomy, all other treatises, whether consciously or not, assumed a geocentric spherical universe, in which planets and stars moved in place, in circular motions, at uniform speeds, and so on. The contours of this universe were already defined by the Aristotelian cosmology that was embedded in, and in fact claimed to be the basis of, Ptolemaic astronomy itself.
In very general terms, one can characterize the whole tradition of Islamic theoretical astronomy, as a continuous attempt to save Ptolemy from his own folly, in the sense trying to make his work more harmonious with the same Aristotelian cosmological principles that he had accepted, and at the same time attempt to take issue with him, and with Aristotle behind him, for all the contradictions their cosmological visions brought forth. But ironically as well, the whole Islamic theoretical astronomical tradition was also an attempt to save Aristotle, whenever his ideas were not contradictory, and at the same time abandon Aristotle, whenever his thought was found absurd. So in a deep sense, one can say that Islamic theoretical astronomy was a continuous debate with Aristotle, but was guided by a real sense of commitment to the physical universe of which those astronomers attempted to make some sense.
One has to understand that this dialogue with Aristotle also took place in a culture that was first and foremost alien to the Greek culture of Aristotle, and had its own basic doctrinal premises that could not be violated. There was no way, for example, to disregard the organizing principle of religion itself, the existence of God, the revealed religion, etc., in any attempt to understand the universe itself. One did not need to speak directly to the issue of God's existence, while describing the motion of the planets and the creation of mathematical models that predicted their positions for any time and place. But one could not attempt to base these models and explanatory techniques on the assumption of God's absence from the universe. As long as Aristotelian cosmology did not come in direct conflict with such fundamental premises, the problem did not arise.
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For a more detailed alternative discussion of the philosophical dimension of Islamic astronomy, see G. Saliba, "Aristotelian Cosmology and Arabic Astronomy", in