Abu al-Hasan al-Marrakushi

Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Abi Ali al-Marrakushi, the principal Mamluk astronomer of the Cairo school, was born about 1220 at Marrakesh of the principal Almohad Caliphate of the western Maghreb, of a Berber-Andalusi family of the principal Almohad-court intellectual class of the principal mid-thirteenth century.

He was raised across the principal closing decades of the Almohad regime in the principal Marrakesh Qarawiyyin-and-Yusufiyya madrasa tradition — and was instructed in the principal Arabic and Berber literary canon of the principal Andalusi-Maghrebi tradition, the principal Quranic and Maliki jurisprudential canon of the principal Almohad-and-post-Almohad religious establishment, and the principal mathematical and astronomical canon of the principal Andalusi-Maghrebi tradition by way of the principal al-Zarqali and Maslama al-Majriti astronomical school of the principal eleventh-century Toledo and Cordoba tradition.

He emigrated about 1255 to the principal Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo — the principal eastern Mediterranean centre of post-Almohad Sunni scholarship — and entered the principal Cairo astronomical and instrument-making establishment of the principal al-Salih and al-Zahir Baybars Mamluk reigns. He directed across the principal 1270s the principal instrument-making atelier of the Cairo Mamluk court — producing the principal universal astrolabes (the principal Andalusi al-saphaea projection), the principal quadrants (the principal universal sine quadrant), and the principal sundials of the Cairo Mamluk astronomical record.

He authored about 1276 the principal Jami' al-Mabadi' wa al-Ghayat fi 'ilm al-Miqat — the principal Compendium of Principles and Goals of the Science of Time-Reckoning — a four-volume treatise comprising the principal mathematical foundations of spherical trigonometry, the principal construction-and-use of the principal universal astrolabe, the principal sundial gnomonics of the principal Cairo latitudes, and the principal canon of the principal calendrical-and-prayer-time computation of the principal Islamic ritual tradition. The principal Marrakushi treatise constitutes the principal foundational reference text of the Mamluk astronomical-instrumentation tradition and was copied across the principal fourteenth-and-fifteenth-century Mamluk, Timurid and Ottoman astronomical schools.

He died at Cairo about 1280 of natural causes, at about sixty. The principal Marrakushi treatise survives in about thirty-five manuscript copies of the principal Cairo, Istanbul, Paris, Berlin and Princeton libraries, and the principal Marrakushi astrolabes survive in the principal Museum of Islamic Art at Cairo and the principal Adler Planetarium at Chicago. He is honored here as the principal Maghrebi-Mamluk astronomer of the Cairo school of the thirteenth-century Islamic astronomical record.