al-Hay'a al-sunniyya (tradition-based cosmology)

"Al-hay'a al-sunniyya" is a phrase taken from the title of al-Suyuti's book, used by Anton Heinen for a genre aiming at a "truly Islamic" science of the cosmos, based on what the Qur'an, Sunna and early reports say about the heavens, the earth and natural phenomena. ^{1 2}

Heinen holds that the cosmological materials these books gather were inherited from the earliest period of scientific interest in Islam, collected and set down between the ninth and eleventh centuries, and compiled anew when the sciences had begun to decline. ¹ Among its roots is al-Khatib al-Baghdadi's treatise on the science of the stars, which distinguishes an acceptable science of the stars rooted in Qur'an, Sunna and early reports — star names, their stations, risings and settings, guidance by them, the qibla, prayer times and the rain-stars — from another that is rejected. ³

In the fifteenth century al-Suyuti gathered this material in al-Hay'a al-saniyya, and in the sixteenth Ibrahim al-Qaramani wrote "The Book of Astronomy based on the tenets of the People of Tradition and Community, not on those of the Philosophers", whose copies and Turkish versions spread through Ottoman libraries. ^{4 5}

Heinen discusses Goldziher's division of the sciences into those of the ancients and those of the religious law, and suggests that so sharp a division may be a later projection onto the past, since astronomy and cosmology were partly rooted in Qur'an and Sunna. ^{6 7 1} He argues, as his academic view, that by lifting the cosmological material out of Abu al-Shaykh's framework of reflection (tafakkur) al-Suyuti turned it into a cosmological system set against others. ⁸