The Universe and the Womb: Generation, Conception, and the Stars in Islamic Medieval Astrological and Medical Texts (original) (raw)
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Classical muslim scholarly interpretations of when pregnancy begins
Muslim scholars apply fiqh (substantive law) from classical text to modern understandings of embryology, yet sometimes we may fail to grasp that the theories of early human development then, may have been quite different to what we know today. There can be a serious charge of misapplication of fiqh when these theories do not correspond. I will demonstrate this using the case of how we define pregnancy. Pregnancy is the state "from conception to birth", but there are problems with this definition as "conception" can mean either fertilization or implantation. This definition is important as it is a determining factor to when we can say a particular intervention is abortifacient or not. I will examine classical Islamic texts to identify whether there was any equivalent theoretical conception of the zygote (the fertilized egg), whether it had any independent moral status, and how fertilization and implantation were understood by classical Muslim scholars compared to what we know today. This will allow us to avoid any misapplication of fiqh pertaining to issues related to this topic.
The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. G. R. Dunstan (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1990), 1990
After summarizing what is known about the life of the Arabic-into-Latin medical translator Constantine the African, I explore the cultural distance Constantine bridged between Islam and Christianity by examining the nexus of ethical concerns surrounding sexuality, contraception, and abortion. These several areas of concern at the borderline of life elicited surprisingly different reactions--a difference attributable not, I argue, to a simple 'conflict between religion and science', but to the more complicated problems generated by Constantine's attempt to transplant a science adapted to one cultural setting into new, and very different, soil. The evidence for a ‘conflict’ between Islamicate traditions and Constantine’s new Christian context are contradictory. On the one hand, we find the complete suppression of the chapter on abortion in the translation of Ibn al-Jazzar's Zad al-musafir. The fact that this suppression is the first and only one I was able to document in early medieval medical literature would seem to suggest that it can be attributed to Constantine’s situation at Monte Cassino, which would have placed him near the epicenter of Gregorian Reform movement. However, when I turn to the topic of contraceptives and attitudes toward sexuality, I find that Constantine supported contraceptives (especially for women) because he supported a belief that sexual activity was necessary to overall health. Since pregnancy could cause the woman harm or disrupt the nutrition needed by a child already at the breast, contraception was also a medical necessity. As I note, “as paradoxical as it may seem, by supporting the translations of Constantinus Africanus and his pupils, one of the leading centers of western Christianity proved instrumental in bringing to the West a medical science only minimally adapted to its new ethical milieu.” Note: At the time of writing this, I had not yet realized that the Practica of Constantine’s Pantegni (ostensibly a translation of al-Majusi’s original two-part medical Arabic encyclopedia) was in fact “made up” after the fact from bits and pieces of other works. Although the gist of my argument remains the same—that this work does not propound a supposedly Christian condemnation of contraceptives—it is unlikely now that its genesis can be tied immediately to Constantine himself. More likely, it was produced sometime in the 12th or early 13th century. For details see Monica H. Green, “The Re-Creation of Pantegni, Practica, Book VIII,” in Constantine the African and ‘Ali ibn al-’Abbas al-Magusi: The ‘Pantegni’ and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), pp. 121-60.
Suhayl. International Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilisation 15, pp. 129-229 , 2017
One of the subjects Arabic astrologers dealt with in the medieval era was the animodar of conception, which used lunar cycles to determine gestation times and to verify the degree of an ascendant, in accordance with one of the principles of Pseudo-Ptolemy's Centiloquium. This paper investigates Ibn al-Kammād's treatise on the animodar of conception edited and translated from Arabic manuscript 939 at the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. The special significance attached to the animodar by later astrologers had two consequences for Ibn al-Kammād's treatise. First, the treatise, which was initially one of several parts of a book, has arrived to us as a self-contained piece, probably because it was already regarded as such in medieval times. Second, the initial contents in Ibn al-Kammād's treatise gradually underwent a transformation due to the addition of a number of materials associated with the animodar.