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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Reviewing an Encyclopedia is in Itself a Difficult Task, Reviewing a specific topic or a set of topics in that encyclopedia while the encyclopedia is still in progress is even more so. An encyclopedia is not a book, one cannot read it from cover to cover even when it is finished. It does not have an introduction, a thesis, an argument, and a conclusion. It is not supposed to establish the frontiers of research in any field or to raise any issues about the direction of such research or the degree to which such frontiers could be pushed; instead it is supposed to report on the state of the art. In short one does not expect to find in an encyclopedia answers to pressing problems in a specific field but guidelines as to where such problems may be found.
Furthermore, an encyclopedia is organized by entries (alphabetically ordered) and not by the logic of the thesis, and the entries are mostly devoted to persons who are deemed as having played important roles in the domain with which the encyclopedia is concerned.
1. The latest statement I have seen regarding this relationship between the Islamic tradition that was critical of Greek theory and the work of Copernicus is at a Vatican site on the internet at (http://www.task.gda.pl/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/d-mathematics/Greek_astro.html) where among other things a page of the manuscript of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, now kept in the Vatican as Arabo 319, is illustrated and its relationship to the works of Copernicus highlighted. A Byzantine manuscript, illustrated on the same web page, carries this explanation: “In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a number of recent Arabic and Persian astronomical works were translated into Greek by scholars who traveled to Persia under the Ilkhanid Empire. One short and confused treatise, translated by Gregory Chioniades, describes Tusi's lunar theory, illustrated, not altogether correctly, in this figure [accompanying figure marked “Byzantine Astronomical Collection”] along with Tusi's device for producing rectilinear from circular motions (shown also in Vat. Ar. 319 [math 19]). A part of the planetary and lunar theory of the astronomers of Maragha [where Tusi built his observatory in 1259] was later utilized by Copernicus, though scholars do not know how he gained access to this material.”
2. See, Saliba, G. “Ibn Sīnā and Abū ᶜUbayd al-Jūzjānī: The Problem of the Ptolemaic Equant,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 4, (1980): 376-403.Google Scholar
3. Rashed, R. and Djebbar, A. L'Oeuvre Algébrique d'Al-Khayyām (Aleppo, 1981) 1, tr. 12.Google Scholar
4. See Saliba, G. “Al-Qushjī's Reform of the Ptolemaic Model for Mercury,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 3, (1993): 161-203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. See Saliba, G. “Early Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Cosmology: A Ninth-Century Text on the Motion of the Celestial Spheres,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 25, (1994): 115-41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Debarnot, Marie-Thérèse Kitāb maqālīd ᶜilm al-hayᵓa: La Trigonometric sphérique chez les Arabes de l'Est à la fin du Xe siècle (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1985).Google Scholar
7. See for example the eye ointments mentioned in the article on ophthalmology.