Al-Asfī’s Description of the Zāwiya Nasiriyya: The Use of Buildings as Astronomical Tools

Abstract

Early Arabic sources report the existence of giant astronomical devices housed inside buildings which were used for observational and computational purposes. Some of them are known to us, but their chronology and their relationship to other well-oriented devices in the Islamic or even in the Latin milieu are yet to be explored in depth. This paper aims to establish whether the zāwiya Nāṣiriyya in Tamegroute (Tamgrūt, in the Drâa valley) described by al-Asfī (seventeenth to eighteenth century) can be considered as part of this tradition.