Astrology and History in Early Islam: Aligning Heaven and Earth

by Antoine Borrut

Overview

Aligning Heaven and Earth in Early Islam focuses on the construction of historical knowledge during the first centuries of Islam (7th–10th centuries CE) and sheds light on the much-neglected genre of astrological histories. It contends that astrologers played a significant, albeit totally overlooked, role in the making of Islamic historiography. The volume documents a unique moment in historical writing and reveals enduring legacies of this exceptional corpus of texts and historical horoscopes. The flourishing and eventual vanishing of astrological histories reveal broader historiographical trends, most notably a shift of cultural brokers serving as arbitrators of (historical) knowledge and a change of regime of historicity. Aligning Heaven and Earth in Early Islam also reveals the forgotten legacies of a moment in early Islamic historiography, when history was being written according to celestial omens and planetary conjunctions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399558259
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2026
Series:	Critical Approaches to Arabic Historiography
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Centrality of Astrology

Part I. Astrology, Empire, and History

Chapter 1: Imagined Beginnings: Founding Baghdad and Writing History
Chapter 2: Astrologers as Historians
Chapter 3: Planetary Conjunctions and Islamic History

Part II. Layers of Forgetting

Chapter 4: The Unthinkable Scientific Continuity: Erasing the Umayyad Century
Chapter 5: Astrologer-Historian: Theophilus of Edessa Reconsidered
Chapter 6: The Lost History of a Polymath: Forgetting al-Khwārizmī the Historian

Part III. The Making of Islamic Historiography

Chapter 7: Writing the History of the Future
Chapter 8: A Moment in Islamic Historiography
Conclusion: Remembering and Forgetting Astrological Histories

Appendix: Main Astrological Histories
Sources
Bibliography
Index