This remarkable book sets a new standard in longue-durée studies of Islamic intellectual traditions that cross the boundary between the premodern and modern periods. Its excellence is manifest in two ways: in what Anchassi has already accomplished in this book, and in the future research that the book could inspire and shape.
With regard to what it has already accomplished, the book excavates a history of the conflicting cosmographies to which Muslims have subscribed in the eastern Arab lands over the course of well over a millennium. It does so on the basis of very extensive and meticulous research in Arabic manuscripts and printed books, presents its findings in a lively, readable, and readily intelligible form, and shows consistent good judgment in aggregating and interpreting its innovative findings. The result is to give us a new and solidly based understanding of the way the denizens of a major civilisation have imagined the cosmos down the centuries.
With regard to research it could lead to, the most obvious project would be to extend the research to all significant regions of the Muslim world: to the Muslim west; to Iran and Central Asia; and to India and Southeast Asia. One question here would be whether non-Islamic cosmographic beliefs associated with particular regions have resonance for Muslims living there—a question also worth asking about the Muslims of China. All this is low-hanging fruit, but it is by no means the only possibility. Another is to compare the history of cosmography among Muslims with its history among a selection of non-Muslim groups, particularly those that have experienced the impact of alien cosmographies, as the Chinese did at the hands of Indians, Muslims, and Jesuits. Yet another is to stay within the Muslim world but compare the history of cosmography with that of other aspects of the civilisation—medicine, for example. In all such developments Contesting Cosmographies can serve as both a starting point and a model.
 Michael Cook

Thanks to the rigorous scholarly effort of Omar Anchassi, we have now an extensive overview of how different thinkers in Islamic societies conceived of the cosmos, from the origins of Islam to the modern world. While some periods and regions are covered in more detail than others, any researcher who approaches this topic from now on will benefit from the knowledge gathered here and will be able to tackle specific authors and questions with the insights provided by this outstanding study.
 Maribel Fierro

With this pioneering longue durée study Omar Walid Anchassi challenges the common presentation of astronomy and cosmography in Islamic Intellectual History that has almost exclusively focused on astral “hard-core” sciences and instead turns the attention to the cosmographic concepts in theological and legal treatises as well as in Qurʾān commentaries and ḥadīth literature from the second/eighth to the fourteenth/twentieth centuries. By an in-depth analysis of the respective texts and through their historical and conceptual contextualisation, he masterly broadens our perspective on Islamic cosmography, its diverse and global sources, and its erudition.
 Anke von Kügelgen

This deeply researched work uses cosmography as a lens for a panoramic exploration of Islamic intellectual history. Sweeping in its chronological and geographical scope, it offers richly contextualized and engaging accounts of individual thinkers. Far more than a history of ideas, it offers a multifaceted analysis of developments in educational institutions, literary genres, and the changing role of the state.
 Marion Holmes Katz

Contesting Cosmographies is a tour de force of a work. This is the first detailed study of the cosmological traditions of Islam from their inception to modernity. The scholarship is meticulous, the sources are extensive, and the analysis is superb. Omar Anchassi has left no study that he did not use or assess. The work will become the reference work on cosmography and related topics for years to come. We have now at last a narrative of how Muslims understood the world around them, and how their ideas changed and evolved. This is a masterful monograph.
 Walid A. Saleh

This work will define the field for many years to come. Through a combination of textual study, historical exposition and bibliographic diligence, Anchassi has charted the journey of Muslim cosmological thinking from its beginnings in the 7th century CE to the contemporary period. The breadth of scholarship is remarkable, and the findings are often counter-intuitive. Whatever period of Islamic history you study, this book will make you think differently about it.
 Robert Gleave

This work is a spectacular achievement: an exhaustive study of the development of cosmographic thought in the Islamic world (mostly in the Arab Middle East), focusing on the Nile-to-Oxus region in the early parts and then zooming in on Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in the latter (19th to 20th C.). There are very important and densely researched passages about the non-Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire and India as well. The work is, in fact, much more than ‘just’ a history of cosmological thought in the Middle East. It doubles up as an introduction to Islamic intellectual history in general. Departing from the compelling assumption that cosmography is a yardstick by which to map intellectual history in the longue durée, the study meticulously traces the centuries-long process by which traditionalist epistemes and later, Aristotelian scholastic traditions were gradually put aside and largely (though not always, and not everywhere) overcome in the Islamic world by the “new sciences”, i.e. Copernicanism. Scholars of Islam, who will use this book for generations to come, will find numerous skillfully told vignettes here of the lives and works of a plethora of philosophers, theologians and scientists, whose legacies are relevant not just to cosmography, but to philosophy, theology, and the sciences in general.
 Christian Lange

Contesting Cosmographies is the product of an absolutely amazing amount of scholarship and will become an essential touchstone for anyone working on cosmology in Islamic history and especially on the reception of Copernicanism in the Ottoman Arabic lands in the 18–20th centuries as well as in twentieth century Saudi Arabia. Representing truly impressive erudition, it contains numerous close readings of previously understudied texts and corrects previously hasty, overly general, or mistaken readings of previously studied materials. Anchassi’s achievement sets a high bar for work in Islamic intellectual history.
 Justin K. Stearns

Omar Anchassi’s Contesting Cosmographies is a work of awe-inspiring erudition. It draws an extraordinarily complex and original picture of how Muslims have conceived of the cosmos over the long history of Islamic civilization. Anchassi is at home in each period he covers, reaches nimbly across fields and disciplines, and thoughtfully synthesizes mountains of information. Accessible, comprehensive, and well written, Contesting Cosmographies should become the standard account of Islamic cosmology.
 Ahmed El Shamsy

Compellingly written and meticulously documented, Anchassi’s monograph is astounding in its breadth and erudition. This ambitious study of the longue durée of Muslim views of the cosmos is poised to become a landmark work of Islamic intellectual history.
 Sean W. Anthony

Grounded in rare erudition, this book offers a richly detailed and intellectually ambitious account of Muslim engagements with the structure of the cosmos from late antiquity to the modern period. Ranging across theological, philosophical, and scientific traditions, Anchassi reconstructs with remarkable comprehensiveness the diverse and often competing cosmographical models—from traditionalist conceptions of layered heavens and earths to the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system and the eventual encounter with Copernican astronomy.
Anchassi’s principal contribution lies in his sustained demonstration that cosmography was not a marginal or purely technical concern, but a central site of interpretive negotiation within Islamic intellectual history. By tracing how scholars read scriptural sources in light of evolving scientific paradigms, and how they variously accommodated, resisted, or reinterpreted new cosmological ideas, the book reveals a dynamic and historically contingent tradition rather than a static inheritance.
Drawing on an impressive range of manuscript sources and spanning regions from the central Ottoman lands to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Arabia, this study is both original in conception and authoritative in execution. It will prove indispensable to scholars of Islamic thought, the history of science, and the broader study of religion and cosmology.
 Asad Q. Ahmed

In Contesting Cosmographies, Omar Anchassi takes on the daunting task of showing “how Muslims have understood the cosmos” from the time of the Umayyads to the modern Saudi state. He casts a wide net to capture the various understandings examining wide ranging sources from biographical dictionaries to Qurʾān commentaries to works in philosophy and astronomy, and everything in between. It is a remarkable book that adds considerable depth to our understanding of how the scholarly, educated class (ʿulamāʾ) thought about the cosmos and the respective roles played by rational and scriptural sources in their understandings. Eschewing simplistic narratives, Anchassi reveals how differential commitments to and positions against occasionalism, Avicennan philosophy, Ptolemaic astronomy, astrology, ḥadīth, tafsīr, Isrāʾīliyyāt, the role of reason in overturning literal readings of scripture, and more, came together in the work of Sunni and Shīʿī scholars from all major schools of law and theology to generate a plethora of positions on the world, ranging from a flat earth to a spherical earth at the centre of the universe, to seven earths and dome-shaped heavens to commitments to an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe of nested orbs and finally to modern cosmography. And almost all of these non-modern cosmography positions are to be found in works authored by the ʿulamāʾ well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contesting Cosmographies should be essential reading for not only historians of Islamic thought but modern religious scholars and reformers who present the Islamic tradition as uniform or monolithic.
 Nahyan Fancy

Omar Walid Anchassi is an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. He has published extensively on Islamic intellectual history and has held posts at the universities of Edinburgh and Exeter and at the King Faisal Center in Riyadh.