Characterizing Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World

University of Chicago Divinity School

12-14 May 2015

Conjuncting Astrology: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences

in the Premodern Persianate Tradition

Matthew Melvin-Koushki
University of South Carolina

The current historiography of Arabic science justly celebrates the emergence of what may be called
mathematical humanism in early modern Iran and Transoxania. This epistemic shift is epitomized by
the unprecedented mathematicalization of astronomy (ʿilm al-hayʾa) by a series of brilliant planetary
theorists and critics of Ptolemy of the caliber of Qāżīzāda Rūmī (d. 1432), ʿAlī Qūshchī (d. 1474) and
Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. 1535), who finally freed it from the constraints of aristotelian physics in a way
that was crucial to the development of heliocentric astronomy in Europe. Yet the mathematical turn
is consistently explained in positivistic and ahistorical fashion as being driven by the divorce of
astronomy from astrology (aḥkām al-nujūm) from the 13th century onward, this as a reaction to
theological critiques in the main. Thus relieved of its occult baggage, simultaneously anti-rational and
anti-religious, astronomy was accordingly free to be mathematicalized, while astrology was demoted
to the status of a suspect natural science and marginalized in all good society—or so the narrative
goes.
A simple survey of Arabic and Persian classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm), however,
indicates that precisely the reverse took place. Far from declining, the occult sciences (al-ʿulūm
al-gharība), including astrology, enjoyed a florescence throughout the Islamicate heartlands in the
mid- to late 14th century; they thereafter vaulted to mainstream status among scholarly and ruling
elites and became fundamental to the construction of early modern imperial ideologies (particularly
Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman). As with contemporary European Renaissance
thought, much of which is similarly occultist, this intellectual sea-change was driven by a general
movement away from Avicennan aristotelianism in favor of neoplatonism and neopythagoreanism,
the natural bases for occult philosophy and praxis. By the early 15th century, prominent persophone
thinkers—friends and colleagues to the astronomers above—began to aggressively reassert the
neopythagorean-neoplatonic doctrine associated in the first place with the 10th-century Brethren of
Purity on the one hand and Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) on the other: number as the root of all knowledge and
uncreated, all-creative matrix of the cosmos. But this neopythagorean shift happened only in the
Persianate east, a realm long neglected by historians of science. In the Persian encyclopedic tradition,
that is to say, but not in the Arabic, various occult sciences (especially astrology, lettrism (ʿilm
al-ḥurūf) and geomancy (ʿilm al-raml) as an interdependent set) were progressively if unevenly
mathematicalized from the 12th century onward, and their new scientific status and legitimacy
formally canonized by the 16th century.
Needless to say, that both astrology and astronomy appear to have been mathematicalized as a
unit undoes the divorce hypothesis guiding current occultophobic scholarship. I argue, to the
contrary, that the feted mathematical turn in astronomy cannot be adequately explained without
reference to the neopythagorean-occultist renaissance that swept Timurid-Safavid Iran at precisely the
same time.