Mashhad manuscript, Courtesy of the New York Public Library
Dr. Fatemeh Tashakori, Postdoctoral Research Associate, is at work on the Mashhad Observatory Project headed by Dr. Heather Ecker at The Dallas Museum of Art. Tashakori’s research includes the study and translation from Persian of the charts and accompanying illustrations of constellations in two manuscripts (New York Public Library and Egyptian National Library) of the Tarjumah-i Suwar alKawakib (Book of Fixed Stars) of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, produced in Iran in the early 1630s by the astronomer Hasan b. Sa‘ad al-Qa’ini. Dr. Tashakori is responsible for the first modern transcription of the Tarjumah-i Suwar al-Kawakib, which she is carrying out by comparing the New York and Cairo manuscripts with an earlier Persian translation of Nasir al-Din Tusi from the thirteenth century.
Mashhad Observatory Project
In the 1630s, under the enlightened patronage of the Safavid governor of Khurasan (north-eastern Iran), Abu’l-Fath Manuchihr Khan (r. 1625-1636), the astronomer Hasan b. Sa‘ad al-Qa’ini brought together a group of scholars and artists to work on the translation to Persian of the Arabic text the medieval classic, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Book of Images of the Fixed Stars (BIFS), an expanded commentary of chapters 7 and 8 of the first century Greek astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy. Hasan b. Sa‘ad al-Qa’ini added a new preface to al-Sufi’s text, a statement of circumstances and purpose that bore testimony to the in-gathering of knowledge through the project of translation. In the preface, the body of the text and in the star charts and drawings, Farsi and Arabic are expertly intertwined, presenting an outstanding example of linguistic intertextuality in seventeenth-century Iran. Such intertextuality turns the manuscript into a literary/scientific palimpsest that compiles new with fragments of earlier sources and creates layers of meaning. The language of the preface demonstrates a worldly view of science that aimed to create benefit through scientific exchanges. This view of knowledge and science was brought about under the patronage of Abu’l-Fath Manuchihr Khan, who had a personal interest in science and art and was enthusiastic about the spread of astronomical knowledge for the sake of public good.