Astrology and History in Early Islam : Aligning Heaven and Earth (Critical Approaches to Arabic Historiography)

Borrut, Antoine

Edinburgh University Press（2026/02発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 512 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399558259
• DDC分類 133.5947

Full Description

Aligning Heaven and Earth in Early Islam focuses on the construction of historical knowledge during the first centuries of Islam (7th-10th centuries CE) and sheds light on the much-neglected genre of astrological histories. It contends that astrologers played a significant, albeit totally overlooked, role in the making of Islamic historiography. The volume documents a unique moment in historical writing and reveals enduring legacies of this exceptional corpus of texts and historical horoscopes. The flourishing and eventual vanishing of astrological histories reveal broader historiographical trends, most notably a shift of cultural brokers serving as arbitrators of (historical) knowledge and a change of regime of historicity. Aligning Heaven and Earth in Early Islam also reveals the forgotten legacies of a moment in early Islamic historiography, when history was being written according to celestial omens and planetary conjunctions.

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: the Centrality of Astrology

Part I. Astrology, Empire and History
1. Imagined Beginnings: Founding Baghdad and Writing History
2. Astrologers as Historians
3. Planetary Conjunctions and Islamic History

Part II. Layers of Forgetting
4. The Unthinkable Scientific Continuity: Erasing the Umayyad Century
5. Astrologer-Historian: Theophilus of Edessa Reconsidered
6. The Lost History of a Polymath: Forgetting al-Khwārizmī the Historian

Part III. The Making of Islamic Historiography
7. Writing the History of the Future
8. A Moment in Islamic Historiography

Conclusion: Remembering and Forgetting Astrological Histories

Appendix: Main Astrological Histories
Sources
Bibliography
Index