In glaring contrast to its rich history, Arab astronomy today is in a miserable state, by all indicators. There is good potential, however, and a number of steps can and must be taken now to reverse the decline, say astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum. 

In my article ‘Time for an Arab Astronomy Renaissance’, published in Nature in June 2013, I decried the sorry state of Arab astronomy today, in stark contrast with its golden era, which lasted from the early 9th century to the end of the 16th century CE.

Today, the whole Arab world is home to only one astronomical observatory hosting a telescope with a diameter of more than 1 metre (in Kottamya, Egypt),  which was built 50 years ago and produces very little publishable research.  Contrast this with the dozen or so observatories in India and South Africa (each). The latter hosts an optical telescope with a diameter of 11 metres. This situation is quite astonishing, considering the existence of high mountains in many parts of the Arab world, the financial wealth of several Arab states, and the existence of a good astronomical community, both professional and amateur.

Another indicator of the sorry state of Arab astronomy today is the dearth of university programmes and the weak research production, as can be measured in the number of papers that are published in indexed journals and in the citation figures for those papers.

Most Arab universities do not even offer a basic introductory astronomy course that, I contend, all students should be required to take. This would help them to understand the universe around them, the sky above them, the phenomena that occur quite regularly (eclipses, solar eruptions, meteor showers, crescent observations, etc.), and the discoveries that are announced almost every day (new planets outside the solar system, most notably).

Stunningly, Arab universities that offer a B.Sc. degree in Astronomy  can be counted on the fingers on one hand.  Very few Arab students graduate in Astronomy each year. At the postgraduate studies level, the situation is similarly if not more depressing.

As to astronomical research, in my Nature article I presented figures showing that the total production in the Arab world is dwarfed by that of Israel, Turkey, or South Africa, in terms of both quantity and quality.

Reversing the decline

Since the publication of that article, there have been a few positive and a few negative developments bearing on the future of Arab astronomy, in terms of the prospects for new astronomical facilities and for universities programmes.

To make it easier for Arab ministries, agencies, and universities to start building astronomical observatories, my students Noora Alsaeed and Nada Abdelhafez and I conducted a theoretical research to determine the best sites for astronomical observations in the Arab world. We used a number of internationally recognized criteria, such as altitude, air transparency, number of clear nights per year, temperature profiles and humidity,  which we extracted from online data.

We produced a graded list of sites where astronomical observatories could be built: South Sinai in Egypt; Hejaz Mountains in Saudi Arabia; Ahaggar and Aures Mountains in Algeria; Wadi Rum in Jordan; Atlas Mountains in Morocco; Marrah Mountains in Sudan; Cheekha Dar in Iraq and Moyen Atlas in Morocco. Other sites were deemed less than satisfactory.

It is my dream that astronomical observatories will be built at each of these sites within the next ten years. In my Nature article I estimated the total cost of building a major facility, including advanced equipment, buildings and local roads and infrastructure, at 50 to 100 million dollars. More modest projects, especially at sites that do not require large expenditures in infrastructure, could be undertaken for 10 million dollars or so.

Last October, the UAE Government’s Information and Communication Technology Fund and the Dubai Astronomy Group announced the launch of a large astronomical observatory project with a budget of 30 million dirhams (8.2 million US dollars), to host a telescope with a diameter of 2.5 to 3 metres. Construction  was supposed to begin this October in the mountains of Ras Al Khaimah, at an altitude of 1,600 metres.

In Algeria, a project for the construction of an observatory in the Aures Mountains (Djebel Chelia, with a peak altitude of 2,300 meters) has been in discussion for years. Astronomers close to the project informed me that good administrative progress has been made lately, and work on the ground could start later this year.

Finally, for the past several years there have been several mentions of astronomical observatory projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iraq, but no official announcements can be found, let alone any evidence of progress on the ground.

Astronomy education at Arab universities, however, is as bad if not worse than ever. The doctoral programme that ran at the University of Constantine (Algeria) from 2008 to 2010 remains frozen, waiting for administrative hurdles to be cleared. A Master’s programme that has been running for more than 15 years in the Institute for Astronomy and Space Science at Al-Bayt University, Jordan, is now practically closed, with no academic or administrative staff left.

The one positive development is the start of a Master of Science in Astrophysics at Notre Dame University – Louaize, Lebanon, jointly managed with Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth.

In order to redress the situation, the following steps must be taken: a) build observatories with 1- to 2-metre telescopes at the sites mentioned above; b) ensure the teaching of at least introductory astronomy courses at all Arab universities, particularly public ones, and establish interdisciplinary programmes between astrophysics and other fields; c) give scholarships to Arab students to pursue graduate programmes at various regional and international institutions; d) organize conferences of international standards, and publish their proceedings; e) conduct training workshops in astronomy for high-school teachers to ensure that various topics in the science curriculum are correctly presented to students and to instill the love of astronomy at the lower educational levels; f) enrich web content on astronomy in Arabic, as today a search for astronomical topics often only brings up astrological pages on the first page of links.

Astronomy is truly beloved in the Arab culture; it is time to boost it on various fronts (educational, professional, amateur, media) and bring it to international levels. It has bountiful rewards to offer.

By Nidhal Guessoum, published in Nature Middle East, October 22nd 2014.

Nidhal Guessoum

Since the Islamic months follow a lunar calendar, the start of each month is marked by the first sighting of the crescent moon. Each year, as the holy month of Ramadan approaches, the endless debate about the start of the month heightens, often with embarrassing consequences. Countless discussions and debates have so far failed to agree on how to resolve this issue once and for all.

Why does the Islamic world find it so difficult to determine the start of Ramadan and the occurrence of the holy days of Eid and Hajj? Why can’t astronomy solve this seemingly simple problem? If science can take humans and robotic crafts to the moon, explore every spot on its surface, search for ice in lunar craters, and send spacecrafts and probes to the outskirts of the solar system, can it not determine the position and illumination of the thin crescent, which signals the start of Islamic months?

As I will explain, science is not responsible for the widespread confusion that engulfs the Muslim world each year just before the beginning and end of Ramadan. Still, and before exploring the reasons behind this state of affairs and proposing solutions to the problem globally, it is important to understand its scientific aspects and see how much progress has been made in this field over the last few decades.

Firstly, a simple distinction must be made. The determination of the moon’s position around the Earth at any given moment and from any specified location is different from the prediction that one will, or will not, see the thin new crescent that appears shortly after the moon has started a new cycle around the Earth.

The first aspect has always been relatively easy for astronomers to solve since the earliest times of the Babylonians, Greeks and Muslims. Today, celestial mechanics has achieved great accuracy. Fast computers are able to solve complicated equations, taking into consideration all factors and effects, such as the gravitational pulls of the Earth, Sun and nearby planets. Surprisingly, determining if the moon would be visible, which sounds like a rather simple task, is much more complex. However, it is far from unsolvable.

The different models

Astronomers have always realized that the observation of the crescent is affected by atmospheric factors, such as turbulence in the air, humidity, dust, and pollution. This is especially true when the crescent is low in the sky, near the horizon, as it always is at the start of the lunar month. Moreover, these effects vary from one location to another and from one evening to the next.

Arc of light (aL), arc of vision (aV), and difference in azimuth (Az)
Schaefer, 1988

And this is why astronomers, from Babylonian times to the late 1970’s, resorted to simple geometrical rules constructed empirically. As can be seen in the figure, angles are simply defined for the relative positions of the crescent, the sun, and the horizon relative to the observer. This way, a rule for whether the crescent will be visible or not at that specific time and place can be calculate with these angles. For example, the oldest such criterion, the Babylonian one, states that the crescent is visible to the naked eye if at the moment of observation, the arc of vision (angle between the moon and the sun) exceeds 12 degrees. This (approximate) criterion was adopted through the ages by various peoples for whom the moon was the basis of the calendar, whether for religious or civil purposes.

Muslim astronomers, including the great Al-Battani, Al-Farghani, Al-Biruni, and Al-Tusi, approached the problem in similar fashion. They obtained limiting values between 9.5 and 12 degrees.

No progress was made until the beginning of the twentieth century, when Western astronomers looked at the problem and found it very interesting. First, the same empirical approach and geometric criteria were sought. Fotheringham (1910) and Maunder (1911) collected data from longer periods and wider regions and found that the minimum arc-of-light angle for seeing the crescent was indeed around 11 or 12 degrees, but only when the relative azimuth (the horizontal angle) between the moon and the sun was zero; the greater the azimuth, the smaller the arc of vision required to spot the cresent. In 1932, Andre-Louis Danjon determined that the crescent could never be seen by the naked eye if the moon-sun angle was less than 7 degrees. This became known as the Danjon limit, which has recently been reduced to 6.5 for the naked eye and 5.5 degrees for telescopes.

The 1970’s and 1980’s saw interesting and novel developments. First, Bruin (1977) realized that, as the problem largely depended on local atmospheric factors [2], it should be treated by physics rather than geometry. Thus he proposed a new model. The contrast between the moon’s brightness (which could be calculated geometrically from the moon’s position relative to both the sun and the observer) and the background sky (which depends on local conditions) is determined. This contrast is then compared to the minimum brightness that the naked human eye (or the telescope) can see. This results in a prediction of the visibility of the crescent on any specific night from any specific location.

During that same period of time, the Malaysian astronomer Mohammad Ilyas did two things [3]. First, he constructed a new geometric criterion similar to the old model but slightly more accurate. He then introduced a new concept, the Lunar Date Line, which divides the world longitudinally into two regions. To the west of that line, the crescent will be seen in the night sky and the month will start the following day. All regions lying to the east of the line would not be able to see the crescent, thus the start of the month would be delayed by one day. It is important to realize that this line changes each month, is not smooth, and has some margins of uncertainty. More models followed over the years, both of the physical type and of the geometric type [4], [5].

To recap, one can say that today we have good models and accurate criteria for knowing where and when the crescent can or cannot be seen. Atmospheric conditions are difficult to predict locally, of course, and so the accuracy of crescent visibility predictions are specific to that region. For practical purposes, a country, or state prediction should suffice.

A unified calendar

Why then are we Muslims still in disarray when we want to know the start of our holy months? Because society, and especially most of its religious leaders, still insists that a month begins when the new crescent is seen by eye. This requirement tends to lead to disharmony between Muslims around the world. Studies have shown that honest mistakes will be made by people when observing the new crescent, even when the crescent is absent from the sky. Investigations by a number of researchers in Algeria, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia have found that over the past 50 years, between 50% and 90% of holy occasions have been wrongly declared based on eye-witness reports,.

As long as we insist on sightings on the eve of a month, especially observations made by the naked eye, we will make mistakes, leading to disagreements within countries and between states. That is why nowadays we find Ramadan starting and ending in the Muslim world over 3 or 4 different days.

So what is the solution to this conundrum? It is simply the establishment of an Islamic calendar and using it for both religious and civil purposes. Saudi Arabia does have an Islamic calendar (the Umm al-Qura calendar), but only for civil purposes, such as the payment of salaries and scheduling school holidays. However, this calendar is routinely violated every time someone reports having seen the crescent on a holy occasion and the authorities accept their testimony.

Are Muslim astronomers today able to construct a calendar that can be fully implemented for religious and civil purposes? Yes. Indeed, after years of work and deliberations in meetings and conferences, two calendar proposals have emerged. The first is the unified calendar [1] based on a single rule for the start of any lunar month everywhere in the world. The second is the bi-zonal calendar [6], put forward by Mohammad Odeh and myself, which splits the world in two (the old continents and the new world) and devises two slightly differing calendars (which agree about 75% of the time and differ by a day in other times).

It may seem obvious that the unified calendar is a better one – and hence to suggest a bi-zonal calendar seems superfluous – but there are pros and cons to each proposal. The unified calendar does not ensure enough concordance with the crescent’s visibility in the Islamic world, while the bi-zonal calendar gives up some of the unity but ensures (for the religious authorities) that the months are almost fully in accordance with crescent observations.

And so if the problem is fully understood, and Muslim astronomers have laboured hard and devised good solutions, why is the Muslim world reluctant to adopt either and solve this long-standing and disturbing socio-religious problem? Because many still find it difficult to go beyond the old traditional ways of observing the crescent on the night of doubt. in order to determine the start of the month.

Once this mental block has been removed, the problem will be solved rather quickly and easily.

Nidhal Guessoum, published in Nature Middle East, August 9th 2010.

Nidhal Guessoum is an astrophysicist and professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah.

References

1. Abdurrazik, J., Al-Taqweem al-Qamariy al-Islamiy al-Muwahhad (The unified Islamic lunar calendar). (Mersem, 2004)
2. Bruin, F. The first visibility of the lunar crescent. Vistas in Astronomy. 21, 331-358 (1977) | Article | ADS
3. Ilyas, M. A Modern Guide to Astronomical Calculations of Islamic Calendar, Times & Qibla. Berita Pub. 169-174 (1984)
4. Yallop, BD. A method of predicting the first sighting of new moon. (HM Nautical Almanac Office, Royal Greenwich Observatory), 69 (1998)
5. Odeh, M. New criterion for lunar crescent visibility. Experimental Astronomy. 18, 39-64 (2004) | Article | ADS
6. “Progress in solving the problem of the crescent-based Islamic calendar”, Proc. 1st Emirates (Intl) Astro. Conf. (eds, Guessoum, N. & Odeh M.), 77-86 (2007)
7. Schaefer, B.E. Visibility of the lunar crescent. Q.J.R. Astron. Soc. 29, 511-523 (1988)

On July 16, 2014, the United Arab Emirates’ leadership announced the creation of a UAE space agency and an unmanned mission to Mars by 2021, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the country. It was the first move by an Arab state, to send a spacecraft to a planet, the moon, or any celestial object. For the past several decades, Arab space programs had been limited to satellites, most often just operated from the ground, but sometimes participating in launching and placing them in orbit.

The existence and extent of Arab space programs, can simply be determined from the national space agencies, which only six Arab countries now have: Algeria (agency founded in January 2002); Egypt (the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, founded in 1994); Morocco (the Royal Center for Space Remote Sensing, founded in Dec. 1989); Saudi Arabia (the Space Research Institute); Tunisia (the National Center for Remote Sensing, founded in 1988); and the UAE (the above-mentioned, just-recently founded agency). The Algerian, the Egyptian, the Saudi, and the Emirati agencies operate satellites. No other space technologies, e.g. rocket launch capability or astronaut training and stays in space (aboard shuttles or space stations), are mastered or pursued by any of the above agencies. (One may recall, rather anecdotally, that two Arab astronauts have made the trip to space, both in the mid-1980’s, aboard the US space shuttle and the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz, respectively.)

The Arab-Muslim attitude towards science and technology, is dominated by a utilitarian view and principle. This is true of governmental officials as well as of the general public. Thus, space programs have focused on satellites, remote sensing, and telecommunications. Space exploration is seen as a luxury, if not a useless endeavor, that certainly does not deserve and cannot justify billions of dollars in spending.

Indeed, the Arab world first focused on telecommunications satellites in the 1970’s, with Arabsat (Arab Satellite Communications Organization) and (later) Nilesat paying for satellites to be placed in orbit and renting slots for TV and Radio channels. Arabsat was established in 1976 by the member states of the Arab League, with a goal of serving the telecommunication, information, culture and education sectors; its first satellite was placed in orbit by Ariane in 1985. It has since had a good half dozen satellites operating on and off.

Arab states have also individually pursued satellite technology, for “strategic” reasons. Iraq was the first Arab state to launch a satellite (in December 1989), becoming the tenth nation in the world to put one in orbit. Other Arab countries later had some satellites placed in orbit for them; they largely focused on remote sensing, e.g. Morocco (Maroc-Tubsat, launched in Dec. 2001) and Algeria (with its Alsat-1, developed in Surry, UK, and launched in Nov. 2002), or GSM-telephony, e.g. the UAE’s Thuraya (built by Boeing for 1 billion dollars, the first being launched in Oct. 2000, the second in Jan. 2003).

In the past decade or so, more such individual state efforts have appeared, particularly from the rich Gulf states. The UAE now has four satellites up in space, Dubaisat-1 and 2, and Yahsat 1A and 1B, all built (mostly) elsewhere and launched by other countries’ rockets. The UAE government, however, announced that Dubaisat-3 will be built at home and mostly using national technical expertise. Indeed, Arab homegrown efforts in the area of satellite design, construction, launching, and orbit placement have until now been extremely weak, especially if one compares with the Indian program, for example…

That is why the recent pronouncement by the UAE government of a mission to Mars, came as such a pleasant surprise, breaking the traditional focus on satellite technology and aiming, through space exploration, at developing national expertise and capabilities, as stated by the UAE President in the official communiqué, that announced the stunning initiative.

In similar and related veins, Qatar and the UAE had recently announced plans to establish: a $3.3 billion Space City (in Qatar), an $800 million space center (in Abu Dhabi), and a spaceport project (also in Abu Dhabi) with Virgin Galactic (which has a facility in Dubai).

One major deficiency that can be noted in these space programs, is the near-total inexistence of coordination or even collaboration, whether at the regional level (e.g. Gulf) or pan-Arab level. Calls have been made for the creation of a Pan-Arab Space Agency (PASA), to operate and coordinate programs at the Arab League level, similar to the European Space Agency (ESA) of the European Union. Such a regional agency would ensure a coordination of efforts, thus reducing costs of launching and operating satellites and allow many countries to benefit from the images and data collected by the various satellites, instead of needlessly duplicating efforts and multiplying spending.

Likewise, one must note the total absence of any pooling of human expertise and resources: to my knowledge, Arab space scientists from across the Arab world or from around the world have never been assembled in a high-level meeting with officials of individual Arab states or of the Arab League.

The Future

Space programs (technology and exploration) have much to offer to the Arab world at this juncture of its scientific, technical, economic, educational and cultural development. Space programs now play essential roles in urban planning (through imaging and remote sensing), land (desert and forest) observations and uses, military surveillance, etc. More intangibly, space programs give a nation geo-political prestige, and perhaps most importantly inspiration and education avenues for its youth.

The Arab world needs to set a clear, multi-faceted, and future-looking space strategy.

By Nidhal Guessoum, published in Muslim-Science.com, October 1^st 2014. 

Nidhal Guessoum is a professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah. You can follow him on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/@NidhalGuessoum.

The search for life elsewhere has recently heated up with the search and discovery of numerous “exoplanets” (“exo” meaning outside the solar system). Several astronomical projects have been devoted to this search, some of them space-based. The first discovery of an exoplanet was made in 1997, and since then, particularly with the launch of the Kepler spacecraft by Nasa in 2009, some 1,800 exoplanets have been discovered with an extreme range of characteristics.

By WAM, published in The Gulf Today, May 16th 2014.

• An introduction by Mr. Mohammed Yahia, the editor of Nature Middle East
• A review by Professor Nidhal Guessoum, AUS College of Arts and Science, of the state of Arab astronomy
• A presentation by the Dubai Astronomy Group of the state of the UAE astronomical observatory project: specifications, location, timeline, scientific prospects, etc.
• A short presentation by two students of Dr. Guessoum on the search for the best sites in the Arab world for astronomical observatories
• A short presentation by Abdelaziz Alzarouni (AUS student) on the Al-Kawn YouTube astronomy show (in Arabic) that he has been conducting with Dr. Guessoum.

To download the program, click here.

Venue: Lecture Hall A, Main Building

Date: May 14, 2014

Timing: 15:30 – 17:00

Cost: Free and open to the public

The second point is that, to understand the structure of the universe, we must track its history. This history is theoretically reconstructed from the data by means of elaborated mathematics. No doubt there is a good deal of bold speculations and crazy ideas in the interpretation. But reality resists, and not all theories are in agreement with the facts. On the contrary, the standard theory now appears as a powerful tool to guide new discoveries. To cut a long story short, cosmologists now think that the universe is expanding, and that the expansion phase started from a dense, hot stage called the Big Bang. During the expansion, the matter/radiation content of the universe dilutes and cools, and the relative abundances of various species of elementary particles change. About 100 sec after the Big Bang, light nuclei begin to form. About 1 million year after that, the universe becomes neutral and transparent, and the light emitted by the so–called last-scattering surface at that epoch is observed as the 2.725 K black body radiation of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Cosmologists also think that there is more matter in the universe than luminous matter. Dark matter, that is probably not similar to the baryons and electrons we are made of, and constitute more than 90 % of the mass density of the universe, is the dominating source of gravity. It collapses and assembles to form small, relaxed structures called « haloes », then still larger and larger haloes, in a process of hierarchical clustering. The small amount of normal matter that is present among dark matter can cool down and collapse in the potential wells of these haloes. Stars form from this cold gas and extract their energy from the nucleosynthesis of heavier nuclei such as carbon and oxygen. At the end of their lifetimes fixed by the amount of nuclear supply, they reject heavy elements into the interstellar medium. New stars and planets form in this gas once it is enriched in heavy elements.

The third point is that, even if we think that the universe is infinite, the observable universe is finite, because of the finite duration of the expansion phase (15 billion years) and finite value of the speed of light. Our Galaxy is located at the center of a 15 billion light-year sphere that is the patch of the universe we can observe. What is beyond the surface of this horizon is not observable. We are not able to move instantaneously to remote space because of the finite value of the speed of light. The travel to distant galaxies is unfeasible. But, for exactly the same reason, we have access to the remote past of the distant regions of the universe, which gives us an image of our own past. So cosmological theories can be tested with observations. We are not at the center of the universe (which has no center), but we are at the center of our observable universe, exactly as any other galaxy is at the center of its observable universe. In some sense, we have recovered a position that was lost with the Copernican revolution.

Modern cosmology also attempts to make a census of matter in the universe. But this census is far from completion. Young and old stars in galaxies are detected through deep optical fields till the edge of the observable universe. However, much of the content of the universe appears to be elusive : most of the young stars appear to be buried in dust shrouds and their energy heats up dust grains and is released at far-infrared wavelengths. There are dark baryons that emit little or no light in the halo of galaxies (brown dwarfs and/or white dwarfs). We also know that neutrinos are massive but there is only a lower limit on the mass. We still ignore the nature of dark matter that is detected through its gravitational effects in galaxies, groups, clusters and large-scale structures. And a cosmological constant with a repulsing effect in Friedman-Lemaître equations, that can be due non-zero vacuum energy, is now measured, without any clear interpretation.

Finally, the description of the structures that appear in the universe requires an increasing level of sophistication from the large scales to the smaller ones : At the largest scales, only gravitation is at work. Galaxy formation involves not only gravitation, but thermodynamics, radiation transfer… The formation of stars is a very complicated issue. And the description of planet formation and evolution seems to be intractable. Here we reach the limits of the cosmological prospect.

By Bruno Guiderdoni, in The Exploration of the Cosmos : an endless Quest ?

In the past few weeks, several impressive developments occurred in the space technology world. Perhaps the most striking one was India’s launch of a spacecraft to Mars, followed by China’s launch of a robotic mission to the moon and the successful placing of the UAE’s Dubaisat-2 satellite by a Russian rocket.

Islamic astronomy enjoyed a golden age from the ninth to the sixteenth century AD. Great observatories in Baghdad, Damascus, Maragheh, Samarqand and Istanbul mapped the sky to set dates for religious and civil festivals and for astrology. Sophisticated calculations and models led to advances in mathematics.

ALI JAREKJI/REUTERS
Observers in Amman, Jordan, watch the transit of Venus across the Sun in June 2012.

Today, Arab astronomy barely registers on the world map. Scientific research is weak across the Arab world, and astronomy weaker still. Unlike countries of comparable gross domestic product per capita, such as Turkey, Israel and South Africa, most Arab nations are generating fewer than ten papers in the field each year, and these are hardly cited. Few sizeable telescopes are operational or planned.

The lagging state of astronomy is a paradox for a region where funding should not be a serious constraint, at least in the wealthier Gulf states. The region has several excellent observing locations above 2,000 metres that benefit from clear skies. Public fascination is strong, as shown by the many local amateur associations and large gatherings for astronomical events, such as eclipses, comet passages or the most recent transit of Venus across the Sun in June 2012.

In my view, astronomy research is being neglected because of the strongly utilitarian Arab Muslim approach to science¹. Cultural principles, such as serving the people first, led Arab nations to build bases in the applied sciences in the second half of the twentieth century, including petrochemical engineering and pharmaceuticals. There was also a need for the region to develop its infrastructure quickly after the departure of colonial powers. Today, subjects such as theoretical physics are taught widely but are low cost and are considered low priority. Astronomy seems to require expensive buildings, equipment and technicians for little tangible return.

Another problem is the lack of expertise in the management of large scientific projects — an essential element if observatories and research centres are to operate effectively. The few large telescopes that have been built in the region in the past 50 years have been poorly run, are often inoperable and have produced few results.

Funding should not be a serious constraint, at least in the wealthier Gulf states.

I call on Arab countries to build a new generation of observatories. A few medium-sized telescopes (one- to two-metres in mirror diameter) costing a few tens of millions of dollars would allow Arab astronomers to join front-line research by searching for supernovae, the afterglows of γ-ray bursts, variable stars and extrasolar planets. Universities need to set up degree and international exchange programmes in astronomy to train and integrate the next generation of Arab astronomers. Such developments would galvanize academic and public interest in fundamental science across the region.

A golden past

Astronomy had a central place in society from the early times of Islamic civilization. In the early ninth century, a few decades after the founding of Baghdad as the capital of the new Muslim empire, the caliph al-Ma’mun (AD 786–833) ordered the erection of two observatories: Shammasiyya near Baghdad, and Jabal Qasiyun on the high outskirts of Damascus. Their main aim was to check solar and lunar data in old Greek and Indian tables, and to produce civil and religious calendars. Facilities included a quadrant made of marble with a radius of five metres to measure angles on the sky, and a sundial with a central gnomon — the column that casts the shadow — more than five metres high.

Islamic practice relies on astronomy for three purposes: computing prayer times for various locations and dates, which are based on the apparent motion of the Sun; determining the direction to Mecca (the Qibla) for prayers; and establishing the dates for holy festivals, particularly Ramadan (the month of fasting) and Hajj (the pilgrimage), which are set by the observation of the thin crescent of the new Moon. All three still cause heated arguments among Muslim astronomers and scholars.

Historically, astronomy was also needed for navigation at sea and on land. Travellers and sailors learned that the arc of the Moon indicates the east–west line; the shortest shadow of a stick gives the north–south direction; the height of Polaris (the Pole Star) above the horizon gives the latitude of the place; and Mintaka, a star in Orion’s belt, traces the celestial equator.

Muslim rulers were also guided by astrology, believing that some days were more propitious than others for mundane activities or stately decisions. Astronomers’ ability to predict planetary motions and alignments, eclipses and new and full Moons was a powerful weapon in a ruler’s arsenal. Courts had a resident astronomer, and mosques had a time-keeper (muwaqqit).

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
An eleventh-century astrolabe, used to measure celestial positions, among other functions.

By the thirteenth century, rulers were erecting great observatories such as Maragheh (in present-day Iran), which was the largest in the world at the time. Astronomers and students from around the world used its sophisticated instruments, which included an armillary sphere model of celestial body motions several metres wide, as well as its library of 400,000 books. Theories developed there include the ‘Tusi couple’ that links linear and circular motion, which was developed by the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in 1247, and later used by Nicolaus Copernicus in his geometry of planetary orbits.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even more stunning observatories were built. In the Samarqand observatory (completed in 1429; now known as Ulugh Beg Observatory), a 30-metre-high building housed ten instruments. These included an armillary sphere; an azimuthal quadrant for measuring the horizontal angle of the star from the north; and a meridian arc with a 40-metre radius, which measured celestial positions to within a few arcseconds. The Istanbul observatory, built in 1577, although smaller, also housed ten instruments and had 15 full-time astronomers². Sophisticated tables giving the positions of stars, planets, the Sun and the Moon were produced in each.

Thus hundreds of stars and constellations have Arabic names, such as Altair, Deneb, Vega and Rigel. Today, more than 20 lunar craters bear the names of Muslim astronomers, including Alfraganus (al-Farghani), Albategnius (al-Battani) and Azophi (al-Sufi). The scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (AD 973–1048) used astronomy and trigonometry to determine Earth’s circumference to within 0.3% of today’s accepted value. Muslim women participated too: in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Fatima of Madrid, daughter of the great Andalusian astronomer Maslama al-Majriti, helped her father to produce tables of star and planet positions. In the tenth century, Mariam of Syria was a skilled constructor of astrolabes for celestial surveying.

From the thirteenth century onwards, major centres of learning were lost, such as those in the Iberian territory of Al-Andalus, and conservative rulers and clergy accorded religious knowledge an ever higher place than worldly science. Universities disappeared and old places of learning became antiquated and disconnected from scientific developments in Europe. Observatories were seldom gifted rich, religious endowments (awqaf) and thus rarely continued for more than a few years or decades after their establishment.

PHOTO YOKO AZIZ/ALAMY
The Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarqand, Uzbekistan, completed in the fifteenth century, was used by several famous Islamic astronomers.

Thus the era of great Islamic observatories came to an end in the later part of the sixteenth century, with the demise of the Ottoman empire and the rise of European science. The practice of astronomy, as with other areas of science at the time, depended on the good will of the caliph or patron. The Istanbul observatory was destroyed in 1580, less than three years after its construction, by a new ruler who had been convinced by the religious establishment that “prying into the secrets of the heavens” was reprehensible and would trigger God’s anger².

As a result, no astronomy and little science were conducted in Muslim countries until the late-nineteenth century.

Arab astronomy today

Things got going again when European powers — Britain and France, in particular — colonized many parts of the Arab Muslim world, bringing modern ideas with them, but education to only a select few.

For instance, the Lee AstroPhysical Observatory in Lebanon, named after its British merchant patron, Henry Lee, was built in 1873 by Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck, a passionate professor of astronomy at what later became the American University of Beirut. The observatory housed a 25-centimetre telescope, which worked well enough until the facility closed in 1980.

In 1891, French astronomers built an observatory on the hilltops overlooking Algiers; it contributed 1,260 photographic plates of the sky between 1891 and 1911 to the Astrographic Catalogue project, a large international effort to map star positions to a high degree of accuracy. In Egypt, the Helwan Observatory was built in the early twentieth century^{3, 4}; an astronomy department was established at Cairo University, and the country joined the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1925 (ref. 6).

Sadly, a world map of today’s observatories shows just two medium-sized telescopes in Arab countries: Egypt and Algeria. By comparison, South Africa has half a dozen big observatories, including the South African Large Telescope (SALT) with an 11-metre primary mirror — the largest single optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. India has at least a dozen observatories, including the Indian Astronomical Observatory at Hanle, which houses a two-metre telescope.

The largest telescope to have graced the Arab world is the 1.88-metre instrument at Egypt’s Kottamia Observatory, in the desert 75 kilometres outside Cairo. The telescope was inaugurated in May 1964, but for decades it was under-used or broken. Refurbished in the 1990s, Egyptian astronomers say that the telescope is now working, although few papers have resulted from it.

In Iraq, an ambitious plan to build a world-class observatory in the northern high mountains was launched in the 1980s, envisaging 3.5- and 1.25-metre telescopes, along with a 30-metre radio telescope⁶. Wars and their resulting damage meant that the project was never finished. Plans to relaunch it have been aired, without progress.

In the past few years, two small observatories have been constructed in other parts of the Arab world. At an altitude of 2,750 metres, the Oukaimeden Observatory near Marrakesh in Morocco hosts a 50-cm robotic telescope for asteroid and comet searches. It is run by the Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh in collaboration with Uranoscope de l’Ile de France (a French amateur astronomy association) and the Marrakesh Amateur Astronomy Association. Another observatory in Lebanon, built by Notre Dame University in Louaize, contains a 60-cm telescope, which is expected to begin operating soon. Other Arab countries have smaller telescopes, with mirrors of 35–50 cm.

Several Arab states have proposed one- to two-metre telescopes over the years, including Algeria, Libya, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but little progress has been seen.

Research analysis

To assess how badly astronomy research is suffering in the region, I compared publication and citation data for Arab nations with data from Iran, Israel, South Africa and Turkey (see ‘Arab astronomy papers’, below). Arab astronomers published fewer papers and had fewer citations than astronomers in those other four countries. The entire Arab world published fewer astronomy papers than Turkey alone, and substantially fewer than South Africa or Israel. Citation figures are worse: Arab astronomy papers were cited less often than Turkey’s, South Africa’s or Israel’s.

As for degree programmes in astronomy or astrophysics at Arab universities, these can be counted on two hands. Small programmes exist in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Only a few dozen out of several million students major in astronomy or astrophysics at undergraduate or at master’s level, and home-grown PhD students are rare.

Conferences, colloquia and summer schools in astronomy are organized, but with modest academic impact. The Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Science (AUASS), a supranational organization linking professional astronomers and amateur associations of the Arab world, holds meetings every two years, but it has not published any proceedings.

SOURCE: THOMSON REUTERS WEB OF SCIENCE

Arab astronomy papers

To assess the state of Arab astronomy research, I used the Thomson Reuters Web of Science to extract publication data for astronomy and astrophysics papers for each Arab country from 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2009. For comparison, I collected similar data for authors from Turkey, Iran, Israel and South Africa.

Because there were few papers for Arab countries, I examined them by hand and discarded ones on tangential and highly theoretical topics. The comparison countries had a greater number of papers, so I examined a random sample of 200 papers from each country and scaled the totals accordingly. For Arab countries, 40–50% of papers were excluded (reflecting the emphasis on theoretical work); for Iran, the percentage was 78%; for Israel, 25%; and for South Africa, 19%.

The number of astronomy papers as a proportion of science papers for the Arab world is 3 per 1,000 (ranging from 1 for Qatar to 6 for Bahrain; Yemen has an abnormally high ratio owing to its very low science production). This is similar to Iran (2) and Turkey (3), but much lower than Israel (14) and South Africa (24), the proportions of which are similar to those of the United States, China, India, Japan, Brazil and Spain. (In these countries, the range is 10–25 astronomy papers per 1,000 publications.)

The United Arab Emirates, for example, with a population of 8 million and a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of US$46,000 in 2011, published 6,000 science publications over 10 years, but only 23 of those were in astronomy. Israel, with a similar population but a 30% lower GDP per capita than the United Arab Emirates, published a total of 143,000 scientific papers, of which 1,500 were astronomy articles. Similarly, of the 13,000 science papers that were published by authors from Lebanon, which has a population of 4 million and a GDP per capita of $9,000, just 19 were in astronomy.

The citation figures are even more striking. For publications in 2000–09, there were 1,507 citations for papers that had a first author from an Arab country and 1,596 for papers that include an author from an Arab country (but not a first author). This is a total of 3,103 citations, compared to 4,355 for Turkey, which contains one-fifth of the population of the Arab world. Israel’s and South Africa’s citation figures were 20 times and 9.5 times higher, respectively, than those of the Arab world.

Looking forward

It is time for governments, funding agencies, science-advocacy organizations and universities of the Arab world to move beyond the utilitarian view of science and promote professional astronomy.

Large projects in this field can inspire the science and technology community, the education sector and the public, and shift attitudes towards basic research in general.

This can be done by accelerating efforts to build high-class observatories, with one- and two-metre telescopes in several countries; establishing astronomy programmes in all public universities; setting up exchange agreements with international institutions; and funding graduate students to pursue doctoral programmes at universities abroad.

The Arab world offers ample sites for high-quality observatories — several mountains have peaks higher than 3,000 metres. Mountain ranges in the Arabian peninsula that span the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Yemen typically enjoy 200–250 clear nights a year. Peaks in the Sinai peninsula reach up to 2,600 metres, where at least 150 summer nights are clear. Similar suitable sites exist in several other countries, from Iraq to Morocco.

Rich Gulf states could work together to set up a world-class observatory. A facility would cost between US$50 million and $100 million, including equipment (a two-metre telescope, photometer, spectrometer, fast computers and network links, and a weather station), buildings with work and meeting rooms, sleeping quarters and leisure areas, and local roads and infrastructure.

Arab universities should cooperate. Expert meetings should be convened to produce white papers on restarting astronomy in the region. These activities should be supported by international organizations such as the AUASS and the IAU to put pressure on governments. And it is essential that major Arab universities offer degree programmes in astrophysics.

Astronomy has a natural place high in the landscape of Arab Islamic culture. It must be brought back.

By Nidhal Guessoum, published in Nature, June 12^th 2013.

Nidhal Guessoum is professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

References

1. Guessoum, N. Nature Middle East http://dx.doi.org/10/mrn (2012).
2. Sayili, S. The Observatory in Islam (Arno Press, 1981).
3. Hady, A. A. Adv. Space Res. 42, 1800–1805 (2008).
4. Hassan, S. M. ‘Kottamia Telescope Upgrading’ in Developing Basic Space Science World-Wide (eds Wamsteker, W., Albrecht, R. & Haubold, H. J.) 237–240 (Springer, 2004).
5. Aiad, A. IAU Colloq. 105, 398–399 (1990).
6. Al-Naimiy, H. M. K. Proc. IAU Symp. 260, 429–437 (2011).

In the Islamic calendar, a new month starts the day after the first naked-eye sighting of the thin crescent, shortly after a luni-solar conjunction. The crescent can be observed after sunset in the general western direction. As the visibility depends strongly on the atmospheric conditions, the beginning of the Islamic new month cannot be predicted very precisely. Three times a year, because of religious events, officials of Islamic countries decree the beginning of the month on the basis of reports from witnesses who volunteer to watch the thin crescent. In the present study, we confront the dates as decreed by the officials with the astronomical data and criteria of earliest visibility. The data collection consists of 115 dates corresponding to the religious occasions in Algeria between 1963 and 2000. We have found those dates to be largely inconsistent with the astronomical data. The rate of impossible cases (where the crescent was not present at all in the sky, let alone be visible) is about 17.4%. In more than half the cases, one or more of the absolute limits or all-time records of visibility was/were violated. And according to most or all the prediction criteria of visibility, there were about 80% cases in error. We have also found that the error rates versus time correlate well with the sociological changes that occurred in Algeria between 1963 and 2000. Finally, we should emphasize that comparatively to Algeria, the error rates are higher in the Middle-East. These results suggest that the officials must reconsider their approach in the determination of the beginning of the Islamic months.

Nidhal Guessoum is associate dean at the American University of Sharjah. He can be followed on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/@NidhalGuessoum

Kiram Meziane, University of New-Brunswick, Physics Department, Canada

Source: http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/

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