Astrology and History in Early Islam

Antoine Borrut is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. A specialist in early Islamic history and historiography, he is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. He is the author of Between Memory and Power: The Syrian Space under the Late Umayyads and Early Abbasids (c. 72-193/692-809) (Leiden: Brill, 2023; originally published in French in 2011 and winner of the Islamic Republic of Iran “World book award” and of the Syrian Studies Association book award). He also edited or co-edited several volumes: Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World: Multilingualism and Language Change in the First Centuries of Islam (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024); Mers et rivages d'Islam: De l'Atlantique à la Méditerranée (Paris: Presses de La Sorbonne, 2023); Christians and Others in the Early Umayyad State (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2016); Le Proche-Orient de Justinien aux Abbassides: peuplement et dynamiques spatiales (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012); Écriture de l’histoire et processus de canonisation dans les premiers siècles de l’Islam Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (REMMM) 129 (Aix-en-Provence: 2011); and Umayyad Legacies: Medieval Memories from Syria to Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

Antoine Borrut has written an outstanding analysis of early Islamic astrological histories, showing how historians shifted from producing astrologically focused to theologically determined chronicles in the early 900s. His insights are field-shifting and, conservatively speaking, should necessitate a re-examination of period sources for their underlying astrological structures.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: the Centrality of AstrologyPart I. Astrology, Empire and History1. Imagined Beginnings: Founding Baghdad and Writing History2. Astrologers as Historians3. Planetary Conjunctions and Islamic HistoryPart II. Layers of Forgetting4. The Unthinkable Scientific Continuity: Erasing the Umayyad Century5. Astrologer-Historian: Theophilus of Edessa Reconsidered6. The Lost History of a Polymath: Forgetting al-Khwārizmī the HistorianPart III. The Making of Islamic Historiography7. Writing the History of the Future8. A Moment in Islamic HistoriographyConclusion: Remembering and Forgetting Astrological HistoriesAppendix: Main Astrological HistoriesSourcesBibliographyIndex