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ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī

Savant

Abū al-Ḥusayn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿUmar al-Ṣūfī was born in Rayy, Iran, in 903, and died in Shiraz in 986. Despite his name, he was not known as a Sufi master: “al-Ṣūfī” was a family name. The Europeans called it Azophi. In the service of the Buyids Al-Ṣūfī worked at the court of the Buyid dynasty, in particular with the sovereign ʿAḍud al-Dawla, of whom he was one of the masters, in Shiraz and Isfahan. He carried out precise astronomical observations there. The Book of Fixed Stars His masterpiece, Kitāb ṣuwar al-kawākib al-thābita (around 964), takes Ptolemy's catalog of stars and corrects it based on his own observations: positions, brightness and colors of the stars. He adds the traditional Arabic names of the stars, many of which are still used today (Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse, etc.). Each constellation is drawn twice: as seen in the sky and as seen on a celestial globe. The illustrated manuscripts in this book are among the most beautiful in Islamic art. A famous discovery Al-Ṣūfī mentions a “small cloud” in the constellation Andromeda: this is the oldest known description of the Andromeda galaxy. It also points out a bright spot visible from southern Arabia, identified with the Large Magellanic Cloud. A crater on the Moon and an asteroid today bear his name. Photo: representation of Azophi on a celestial map by Albrecht Dürer (1515).