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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2013
Kitab Suwar al-Kawakib (The Book of the Forms of the Stars) of ʿAbd al-Rahman b. ʿUmar al-Sufi (d. 986), though based largely on Ptolemy's Almagest, included much original material. In the 20th century, its importance for scholars lay mainly in its attestation of the ways Islamicate scholarship built on classical learning. Now we are finding that it also offers fascinating insights into the complex relationship between seeing and knowing in premodern Islamic book culture. Here, I consider that relationship through analysis of the paired images of the constellation Barshawush (Perseus) from the oldest surviving manuscript, copied and likely also illustrated in 1009–1010 by al-Sufi's son.
1 Wellesz, Emmy, “An Early al- Ṣūfī Manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford: A Study in Islamic Constellation Images,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959): 1–26Google Scholar, here 1, n. 2; Carey, Moya, “al-Sufi and Son: Ibn al-Sufi's Poem on the Stars and Its Prose Parent,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 181–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 187–88. Doubts about the manuscript's authenticity may be laid to rest after the thoughtful analysis of its provenance in Moya Carey, “Painting the Stars in a Century of Change: A Thirteenth-Century Copy of al-Ṣūfī's Treatise on the Fixed Stars, British Library Or. 5323” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2001), 173–82.
2 Wellesz, “An Early al- Ṣūfī Manuscript,” 18, 5.
3 Carey, “Painting the Stars,” 85; idem, “Mapping the Mnemonic: A Late Thirteenth-Century Copy of al-Sufi's Book of the Constellations,” in Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, ed. Anna Contadini (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 65.
4 London, British Library Or. 5323.
5 Carey, “Mapping the Mnemonic,” 67.
6 Berlekamp, Persis, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
7 Adomova, Ada, “The Repetition of Compositions in Manuscripts. The Khamsa of Nizami in Leningrad,” in Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Golombek, Lisa and Subtelny, Maria Eva (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 67–75Google Scholar; Roxburgh, David J., “‘The Eye Is Favored for Seeing the Writing's Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 275–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.