Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus: A Compilation Perspective on Astronomical History
TÜBA International Academy Award winner Prof. Dr. Jamil Ragep's "Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus", which consists of 15 works published in various sources in the last forty years, has been published as a book by the Turkish Academy of Sciences.
Bringing together fifteen articles that have been published by F. Jamil Ragep over the last four decades, this volume offers fresh insights and a deeper understanding of how Islamic astronomical and scientific traditions influenced the emergence of the Copernican heliocentric system. These articles not only provide new technology and content-based evidence regarding the Islamic background of Copernicus but also highlight the importance of studying scientific and historical contexts in which Islamic astronomy could find its way into medieval and early modern European intellectual and cultural settings. Raising new questions and contributing solid research through the examination of various Islamic, Latin, and Greek scientific texts, Ragep’s articles will be useful for anyone interested in engaging in the study of the IslamicCopernicus connection from a broader multicultural perspective.
Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus
Who is Prof. Dr. Jamil Ragep?
Born in West Virginia (USA), F. Jamil Ragep attended the University of Michigan, where he received degrees in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, and later took a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard University. He was Canada Research Chair in the History of Science in Islamic Societies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada from 2007 until 2020, at which time he retired as Professor Emeritus. He has written extensively on the history of science in Islam and has co-edited books on the transmission of science between cultures and on water resources in the Middle East. Thanks to major grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Quebec government, and in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), Ragep was able to initiate an ongoing international effort to catalogue all Islamic manuscripts in the exact sciences and provide a means to access information online on the intellectual, institutional, and scientific contexts of these texts (Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative [ISMI]). Most recently, TÜBA International Academy Prizes laureate Prof. Dr. F. Jamil Ragep has published a number of articles and co-edited a volume of essays dealing with the Islamic background to the Copernican revolution.