Jörg Matthias Determann, VCUarts Qatar associate professor, recently spoke with Marina Koren, senior associate editor of The Atlantic, about his new book Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (published by I.B.Tauris).
Marina Koren: What made you decide to leave the Golden Age behind and focus on modern-day space research in the Middle East?
Jörg Matthias Determann: I found modern astronomy and space science in the Arab world, the kind of research that has existed since 1800, to be broadly an under-researched topic, compared with all the research that we have on medieval and premodern Arabic and Islamic science. And there was long the idea that science was one thing that moved through history, and the Arabs had their role in that history only at a certain point. There was this narrative where science emerged thousands of years ago with the ancient Babylonians, perhaps the ancient Chinese as well, and then it would move on to the Romans and the Greeks, and then science was inherited by the Arabs and they preserved it and worked a little bit on it, and then the Arabs passed science on to Europe, when Europe had its renaissance, and then science moved to America, which is now the world center of science.
Read the full interview in The Atlantic.
Image: A 2015 moon-sighting event in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates Kamran Jebreili / AP. Credit via The Atlantic.
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