Some modern scholars go so far as to say that their work is organically embedded within Copernican astronomy to the point that removing their scholarship would destroy the mathematical integrity of Copernicus’s model. Some even refer to Copernicus as “the last member of the Maragha school of astronomy,” named after the observatory in Maragheh, Iran, founded by al-Tusi.
The 14th century Arab astronomer Ibn al-Shatir, who was the chief muezzin of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, administering the times for 5 daily prayers, based on the position of the sun in the sky, created a heliocentric or sun-centric model of the cosmos that was later found in Copernicus’s key work published in 1543: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres).
The Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274) went to work with the Ismaili rulers of Alamut, where he spent many years composing some of his most important works. After his death, his influence continued in fields as diverse as ethics, philosophy, mathematics, logic and astronomy. He invented a geometrical technique called the 'Tusi couple,' which generates linear motion from the sum of two circular motions.
The Spanish-Jewish author Abner of Burgos (1270–1340) was familiar with the Tusi couple and followed Tusi’s notation in his diagrams. From Spain al-Tusi theories spread through Europe. The Tusi couple was introduced by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus. Another of Tusi´s astronomical manuscripts, which was used in Italy by 1475 CE, includes a treatise dealing with planetary theory that contains diagrams of a Tusi couple and lunar model.
Adaptation of the article “Thought of the Week” (Al-Saha ITREB UK 5/11/2021)
