Hidayat uli al-basa'ir wal-absar (al-Suja'i)

Hidayat uli al-basa'ir wal-absar ila ma'rifat ajza' al-layl wal-nahar (al-Azhar Library no. 438/53670) is by Ahmad al-Suja'i. ¹ The Bibliotheca Alexandrina book calls it a witness to Muslims' attention to the human side of learning and their care to give the blind access to knowledge, as its title and content show. ¹

A pupil of Shaykh Ayyad, an astronomer, was blind and asked his teacher for an easily memorised poem on timekeeping; the shaykh composed the "Poem of Shaykh Ayyad", and this manuscript is a commentary on it. ² It covers leap and common years, the seasons, the zodiac, the size of the sun, the lunar mansions, computing the length of night and day, and the qibla direction. ² The Azhar copy has 41 folios. ²