In Islam, as in no other religion in human history, the performance of various aspects of religious ritual has been assisted by scientific procedures. The organization of the lunar calendar, the regulation of the astronomically defined times of prayer, and the determination of the sacred direction toward the Ka ˓ba in Mecca are topics of traditional Islamic science still of concern to Muslims today, and each has a history going back close to 1,400 years. But the techniques advocated by the scientists of medieval Islam on the one hand and by the scholars of religious law on the other were quite different, and our present knowledge of them is based mainly on research conducted during the past 30 years on one small fraction of the vast literary heritage of the Muslim peoples. To understand Muslim activity in this domain we must realize that there were two main traditions of astronomy in the Islamic Near East, folk astronomy and mathematical astronomy.
The Regulation of the Lunar Calendar
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King, D.A. (2008). Religion and Science in Islam I: Technical and Practical Aspects. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9287
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