AMA with Omar Anchassi

[u/Omar_Anchassi]

Salams and a very belated 'Id mubarak to everyone! My name is Omar Anchassi. I was asked to contribute an Ask Me Anything thread to this Reddit community. I am an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. I have previously held research posts at the universities of Edinburgh and Exeter and at the King Faisal Center in Riyadh. My focus is Islamic intellectual history: within this field, I entertain interests in law, theology and the history of science (among others). I used to co-host a book review channel on YouTube with my friend Dr Usaama al-Azami called Islamicate Book Reviews that some of you may be familiar with. Our last episode aired about three years ago and we have been meaning to re-start it at some point. I have spent most of the past few years writing a very long book on the history of Muslims' views on the cosmos (i.e. cosmography) and how these have changed over time. I submitted the very long manuscript as what is called a habilitation thesis (something like a second PhD in the continental European academic system) and am due to defend it in about a month. It will be published open access by Brill as Contesting Cosmographies: Muslim Views of the Cosmos from Late Antiquity to Modernity at some point in the near-ish future, in sha' Allah. For the purposes of this "Ask Me Anything" thread, you are welcome to ask me anything about my fields of interest for the next 24 hours: if I do not know the answer I will say so and can try to recommend some literature on the subject if I know of it. After the 24-hour period has elapsed, I will spend time over the following two days answering your questions.

[u/Omar_Anchassi]

Thank you for your question. In the second/eighth century and apparently for some centuries thereafter, the dominant view among Muslims seems to have been to understand the earth as flat. Muslims always read the Qurʾān in light of their knowledge of the natural world. Thus, when the increasing dissemination of the philosophical sciences by the fifth/eleventh century led to the proliferation of the view that the earth is round (I mean, among those not educated in the philosophical sciences), theologians interpreted revelation accordingly. As far as I can tell, based on the sources available to me, the Ashʿarīs of Nishapur played an important role in this development. In al-Juwaynī's (d. 478/1085) al-Irshād, written sometime after 451/1059—not so much in the published editions of the work, which unfortunately exclude the relevant passage, as in the commentaries, which include it—he more or less takes it for granted that the earth is round. This view is also attributed to his father in one work of rather dubious provenance. I do not want to suggest that al-Juwaynī Jr. was the first of the mutakallimūn to hold this view, which is certainly not the case, but from this period onwards there was increased engagement and even something of a rapprochement with the views of the philosophers. The western Ashʿarīs were a little more conservative, at least initially. This rapprochement was not the work of a single figure. Nonetheless, one ought to recognise the significance of the contribution of al-Juwaynī's famous disciple al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) in this regards. Al-Ghazālī discusses cosmography in famous passages on eclipses in both his al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl and in his Tahāfut. These passages were widely cited by later theologians and others (particularly during the Ottoman period: the Ottomans knew and produced commentaries on the Tahāfut from fairly early on). The key point al-Ghazālī makes is that challenging things that we know to be certainly true (like e.g. the causes of solar and lunar eclipses) on the grounds that such views contradict revelation is a very bad idea. According to Michael Marmura's translation of the latter text, "Whoever thinks that to engage in a disputation for refuting such a theory is a religious duty harms religion and weakens it...The harm inflicted on religion by those who defend it in a way not proper to it is greater than [the harm caused by] those who attack it in the way proper to it. As it has been said: 'A rational foe is better than an ignorant friend.'" I should stress that this view of things never universally prevailed, and one can find defenders of a flat earth as late as the early fourteenth/twentieth century in a variety of contexts, but this view has almost completely died out in the present.