Zhamaluding: Jamāl
al‐Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ṭāhir ibn Muḥammad al‐Zaydī
al‐Bukhārī
Benno van Dalen
Alternate
name
Jamāl
al‐Dīn
Flourished (Mongolia)
and Beijing, China, circa 1255–1291
The
Muslim astronomer Zhamaluding (Chinese transliteration of Jamāl al‐Dīn)
was the first director of the Islamic Astronomical Bureau established in
Beijing in 1271. He was involved in the compilation of a zīj
(astronomical handbook with tables) in Persian, which was largely based
upon newly observed planetary parameters and was translated into Chinese,
under the title Huihuilifa, during the early Ming dynasty. Furthermore,
Zhamaluding's name is associated with a “Geography of the Yuan empire,”
finished in 1291.
Most of the historical information concerning Zhamaluding
stems from the official annals of the Yuan dynasty, the Yuanshi,
and from the “Annals of the Yuan Office of Confidential Records and Books”
(Yuan bishujian zhi, reprinted in the Sikuquanshu). It appears
that Zhamaluding was in the service of the Mongol Great Khans from the 1250s
onward. A certain Jamāl al‐Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ṭāhir ibn Muḥammad
al‐Zaydī al‐Bukhārī, hailing from the region
of Bukhara in present‐day Uzbekistan and presumably identical with
Zhamaluding, is mentioned in the Jāmiʿ al‐tawārīkh (World history) of the
famous Persian historian Rashīd al‐Dīn (died: 1317) as not
having been capable of carrying out the construction of an astronomical
observatory for Möngke Khan (1251–1259) in his capital Karakorum in central
Mongolia. Möngke's successor Khubilai had already consulted Zhamaluding
and other Muslim astronomers before he became the first emperor of the Yuan
dynasty in 1264 and moved his capital to Beijing (Dadu). Three years later,
Zhamaluding presented to Khubilai the Wannianli (Ten thousand‐years
calendar, presumably an Islamic zīj), which was for a short
period distributed as an official calendar but is no longer extant. Furthermore,
Zhamaluding offered models or depictions of seven astronomical instruments
of Islamic type, namely an armillary sphere, a parallactic ruler, an instrument
for determining the time of the equinoxes, a mural quadrant, a celestial
and a terrestrial globe, and an astrolabe.
In
1271, Khubilai Khan founded an Islamic Astronomical Bureau with observatory,
which was to operate parallel to the traditional Chinese bureau. He thus
maintained the bureaucratic structure of the preceding Jin dynasty, but
at the same time allowed Chinese observations and predictions to be checked
against those of the highly respected Muslim astronomers. Zhamaluding became
the first director of the Islamic Bureau and headed a staff of approximately
40 persons, including astronomers, teachers, and administrative personnel.
Because, in particular during the 1260s, tens of thousands of Muslims had
arrived in China, it need not surprise us that the staff included capable
astronomers and that a large observational program could be carried out
in order to redetermine most of the planetary parameters and to measure
anew the longitudes and latitudes of hundreds of fixed stars. The Islamic
Astronomical Bureau of Yuan China thus became one of the very few Islamic
institutions where observations were carried out at such a large scale.
Although the bureau was not abolished until 1656, its direct influence on
Chinese astronomy was very limited and no Islamic methods were incorporated
into the official calendar of the Yuan dynasty, the Shoushili, by
Guo Shoujing.
Zhamaluding
was also one of the directors of the imperial “Office for Confidential Records
and Books” (bishujian), to which both astronomical bureaus were subordinate.
The extant annals of this office contain a list of books and instruments
present at the Islamic Observatory and in Zhamaluding's private library.
From the Chinese transliterations of the book titles and brief descriptions,
it can be seen that the following works were available: the Almagest
of Ptolemy,
the Elements of Euclid, the Madkhal (Introduction to astrology)
by Kūshyār ibn Labbān,
the Stellar constellations by Ṣūfī, zījes, and
books on hay'a (cosmology) and the construction of instruments. The
transliterations were clearly made from the Persian (rather than from the
Arabic), as can be seen from certain grammatical elements and some small
variations in terminology.
Zhamaluding
was very probably the author of a zīj in Persian, or at least
was associated with its compilation. The original of this work is lost,
but a Chinese translation entitled Huihuilifa (Islamic calendar)
has drawn the attention of Chinese scholars ever since its publication in
the annals of the Ming dynasty (Mingshi) prepared in the late 17th
century. The translation was made in 1383 by a Muslim astronomer, Ma‐shayihei
(possibly a shaykh who had assumed the common Chinese surname for
Muslims, Ma), in cooperation with Chinese scholars. This project, which
also included a translation of Kūshyār's Madkhal, was carried
out at the Astronomical Bureau of the new capital Nanjing on the order of
the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Hong Wu.
In
recent years the number of known sources from which the contents of Zhamaluding's
original zīj may be reconstructed has significantly increased.
A late‐15th‐century restoration of the Chinese translation by
the vice director of the Astronomical Bureau in Nanjing, Bei Lin, as well
as a Korean reworking made on the order of King Sejong (1419–1451), turned
out to be more complete than the version published in the Mingshi.
An Arabic zīj written in Tibet in 1366 by al‐Sanjufīnī
contains many tables taken directly from the Huihuilifa and others
that were derived from that work. Al‐Sanjufīnī 's
solar tables are said to be based on the “Jamālī observations,”
i. e., probably, those carried out under Zhamaluding. A Persian–Arabic
manuscript at the Oriental Institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which
was clearly copied by someone who did not know Arabic or Persian very well,
was presumably a working document of the Chinese translators, since it contains
original tables for Beijing besides newly computed ones for Nanjing.
An
investigation of all these sources has shown that Zhamaluding's original
zīj contained planetary tables of standard Ptolemaic type, but
based on mostly new values for the mean motions, eccentricities, and epicycle
radii. For example, the solar mean motion in longitude as found in the Huihuilifa
implies a length of the tropical year (in sexagesimal notation) of 365;14,31,55
days, one of the most accurate values hitherto found in Islamic sources
(the actual year length in 1300 was approximately 365.242236, i. e.,
365;14,32,3 days). Zhamaluding's method for predicting solar and lunar eclipses
appears to be a mixture of Islamic and Chinese methods. The origin of the
star table in the Huihuilifa, which lists non‐Ptolemaic longitudes,
latitudes, and magnitudes of 277 stars near the ecliptic with Ptolemaic
as well as Chinese star names, has not yet been completely clarified. The
translators in the early Ming dynasty certainly made various modifications
to this table, which they utilized for the calculation of so called encroachments
(lingfan), i. e., passings of the Moon and planets through
stellar constellations, which were highly significant in Chinese astrology.
In 1286, undoubtedly as a senior scholar, Zhamaluding suggested to
Khubilai a large‐scale geographical survey of the Yuan empire. He
became the head of an office especially established for this purpose and,
since he did not speak Chinese, was provided with a personal translator.
The result of the survey, the Dayitongzhi (Geography of the whole
empire) in 755 volumes, was offered to the emperor in 1291 and finally printed
in 1347. Unfortunately, only the introduction of this work is extant.
Selected References
Chen Jiujin (1996). Huihui tianwenxue shi yanjiu (Investigations
on the history of Muslim astronomy, in Chinese). Nanning: Guangxi kexue jishu
chubanzhe.
Dalen, Benno van (1999). “Tables of Planetary Latitude in the
Huihui li (II).” In Current Perspectives in the History of Science
in East Asia, edited by Yung‐Sik Kim and Francesca Bray, pp. 316–329.
Seoul: Seoul National University Press.
——— (2000). “A Non‐Ptolemaic
Islamic Star Table in Chinese.” In Sic itur ad astra: Studien zur Geschichte
der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Festschrift für den Arabisten Paul
Kunitzsch zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Menso Folkerts and Richard Lorch,
pp. 147–176. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
——— (2002). “Islamic
and Chinese Astronomy under the Mongols: A Little‐Known Case of Transmission.”
In From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas,
edited by Yvonne Dold‐Samplonius et al., pp. 327–356. Stuttgart:
Steiner.
——— (2002). “Islamic
Astronomical Tables in China: The Sources for the Huihui li.” In History
of Oriental Astronomy, edited by S. M. Razaullah Ansari, pp. 19–31. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Hartner, Willy (1950). “The Astronomical Instruments of Cha‐ma‐lu‐ting,
Their Identification, and Their Relations to the Instruments of the Observatory
of Marāgha.” Isis 41: 184–194. (Reprinted in Hartner, Oriens‐Occidens,
edited by Gunter Kerstein et al., pp. 215–226. Hildesheim: Georg Olms,
1968.)
Miyajima, Kazuhiko (1982). “Genshi tenmonshi kisai no isuramu
tenmongiki ni tsuite” (New Identification of Islamic astronomical instruments
described in the Yuan dynastical history, in Japanese). In Tōyō
no kagaku to gijutsu (Science and skills in Asia: A festschrift for the
77th birthday of professor Yabuuti Kiyosi), pp. 407–427. Kyoto: Dohosha.
Shi Yunli (2003). “The Korean Adaptation of the Chinese–Islamic
Astronomical Tables.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 57: 25–60.
Tasaka, Kōdō (1957). “An Aspect of Islam Culture Introduced
into China.” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Tōyō Bunko
16: 75–160.
Yabuuti, Kiyosi (1987). “The Influence of Islamic Astronomy
in China.” In From Deferent to Equant: A Volume of Studies in the History
of Science in the Ancient and Medieval Near East in Honor of E. S. Kennedy,
edited by David A. King and George Saliba, pp. 547–559, Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences. Vol. 500. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
——— (1997). “Islamic
Astronomy in China during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (translated and partially
revised by Benno van Dalen). Historia Scientiarum, 2nd ser., 7: 11–43.
Yano, Michio (1999).
“Tables of Planetary Latitude in the Huihui li (I).” In Current
Perspectives in the History of Science in East Asia, edited by Yung‐Sik
Kim and Francesca Bray, pp. 307–315. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.
——— (2002). “The First Equation Table for Mercury in the Huihui
li.” In History of Oriental Astronomy, edited by S. M. Razaullah
Ansari, pp. 33–43. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.