Arab Astronomy

0:50

6 Jul 2010

Astronomy, History of Science

Chris Impey

This video is presented by Chris Impey on his user page, “Teach Astronomy”, which supplements teachastronomy.com.  Most of the videos are quite short — less than 2 minutes — and this one is similarly brief.  In the video, Impey suggests that “Arabs” continued doing science during the European “dark ages”.   This science included refining the measurement of the Earth’s circumference, and developing ideas about optics.  “Arab” terms were used for star names, chemical and mathematical symbols.

Evaluation:

Although the speaker does not say anything explicitly about Islam, he states that “the Qurʾān forbids pictorial representations of the heavens”.  There is no such restriction in the Qurʾān.  The speaker also should have been using “Muslims” rather than “Arabs”, as even in the central Islamic lands, not everyone was an Arab.  In fact, many famous Muslim scientists were not Arabs.

The science presented here is vague.  Although most of it seems to be superficially true, it probably deserves more than 50 seconds of treatment.  Muslim scholars had many representations of the heavens.

The historical material presented is simplified to the point of being valueless.  It seems to suggest that the only point of contact between Europe and Muslims would have been through Iberia, whereas there was trade and contact across most of the Mediterranean basin.  Terms like “Arab times” have little meaning and are not defined in the video.