A long overdue celebration of Islamic astronomy at UK's largest planetarium

British-Iraqi artist Sarah Al Sarajj hopes to break the National Space Centre's silence on the contributions of medieval Islamic scholars to modern astronomy

The Dog Tooth of Time by Sarah Al Sarraj. Photo: Sarah Al Sarraj

The Islamic Golden Age’s contributions to modern astronomy are immense but are rarely celebrated at the UK’s largest planetarium.

Sarah Al-Sarraj, a British-Iraqi artist from Leicester, hopes to change this with a day devoted to Islamic astronomy at her hometown’s National Space Centre – a museum dedicated to space exploration.

The centre’s planetarium was named after the British amateur astronomer Sir Patrick Moore.

Yet when Ms Al-Sarraj was walking through the museum's offices, she felt the contributions of Islam and other cultures to astronomy were not represented. “There were so many portraits on the wall of a white man, and another white man, and another white man,” she told The National.

This was all the more surprising to Ms Al-Sarraj, given that Leicester is a city of migrants, mainly from India, and with a large Iraqi community as well. “I started to question who owns vastness, who owns our understanding of the cosmos? Like a lot of migrant communities in the UK, we have our own understandings of cosmology,” she said.

That is when she came up with the idea of hosting the Islamic Astronavigation and Art day, taking place in the museum's planetarium on Sunday, October 20. Though science and religion are often viewed as opposites today, she said, they were interconnected in the medieval Islamic world. “In Islamic societies science flourished because seeking knowledge is a form of worship,” she said.

Islamic astronomers improved the astrolabe, a device that allowed travellers to find their way using the stars as a guide. The Caliph Harun Al Rashid established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad with an observatory, where key astronomical discoveries were made.

One of the period’s most famous works is the Zij Al Sindhind by Al Fazari, which traced the movements of the Sun, Moon and known planets, from Mercury to Saturn.

Today, the Muslim faith continues to be guided by the stars and the Moon to determine prayer times and religious festivals.

The Islamic Astronavigation and Art day will feature a planetarium show inspired by the findings of Islamic astronomy, while Ms Al-Sarraj alongside curator Jessica El Mal will host a zine-making workshop on the theme of time. The event is a collaboration between the Arab British Centre and the New Crescent Society.

It is inspired by paintings that the artist has on display at the Two Queens Gallery in Leicester until October 26, as part of the city's Journeys International Festival. The series entitled Separated by Millenia tells the story of a nomadic tribe that discovers how to manipulate time.

The tribe uses stars, smells, animal migration patterns and wind directions to travel through time, abilities that lead members to care for and worship the natural world.

The story ends with two members, separated by a 1,000 years but who look at the same star “longing for each other”.

Ms Al-Sarraj explains that the series is not science fiction in the traditional western sense. “It is trying to look at time, not through a western hegemonic scientific lens, but through an Islamic, Arabian, indigenous mythological lens,” she said.

Nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula, before Islam, often wrote poetry about the stars, which they relied on to navigate through the desert. Many of their Arabic names survive in English today, such as Aldebaran, a red giant star near the Pleiades constellation, which the Arabs knew as Thuraya.

One painting shows three women using an ancient navigation device known as a kamal, in which a string attached to a square piece of wood is used by sailors to determine the position of the North Star.

It was first used by Arab navigators in the 9th century and later adopted by Indian and Chinese sailors. “I look at knowledge systems or world ordering systems that predate the colonial systems that we have at the moment, that govern our current lives,” she said.

The kamal is “really dependent on the embodied experience of the user”, as opposed to modern time-keeping. "Time was standardised in order to facilitate large-scale marine operations and the transatlantic slave trade," she said.

She views her work as political and more than a celebration of her Iraqi and Muslim heritage. Rather, she wants to remedy colonial hangovers relating to our understandings of space, the stars and time. “I'm interested in precolonial principles, because I want to disrupt the legacies of violence that surround us in the present,” she said.

She believes these all-but-forgotten indigenous knowledge systems can create a fairer world, that is more conscious of social justice and caring for the planet. “It asks what it means to care about intergenerational justice, and to be accountable to our ancestors and our descendants,” she said of the paintings.

She is also commenting on the experience of coming from a family of immigrants, where she grew up between two worlds. She recalled how her family and parents' friends gathered at her home until late hours, because most public spaces where they could socialised closed early in the city. “I want it to speak to the experience of being in a third space, or in a hybridised reality,” she said.

It is up to people like her, who inhabit these two worlds, to get rid of the colonial hangovers and decolonise institutions such as museums. “There can be power in being British," she said. "You can use that power to disrupt the structures.”