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Ibn al-Haytham, On the Configuration of the World. Preface to the Routledge

reprint, summer 2016.

Book · July 2016

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Tzvi Langermann
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 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 1979.

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 bio-bibliographical 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), 95 -108. Pages 19-22 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), 47-63.

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 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, ṣāḥib al-Manāẓir, 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, 2013.

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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