13 Facts About Ali Qushji

Ala al-Din Ali ibn Muhammed, Persian: known as Ali Qushji was a Timurid theologian, jurist, astronomer, mathematician and physicist, who settled in the Ottoman Empire some time before 1472.

Ali Qushji Kuscu was born in 1403 in the city of Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan.

Ali Qushji attended the courses of Qazi zadeh Rumi, Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid Kashani and Muin al-Din Kashi.

Ali Qushji moved to Kerman, Iran, where he conducted some research on storms in the Oman sea.

Ali Qushji moved to Herat and taught Molla Cami about astronomy.

At that time Husayn Bayqarah had come to reign in Herat but Ali Qushji preferred Constantinople over Herat because of Sultan Mehmed's attitude toward scientists and intellectuals.

Ali Qushji Kuscu composed "risalah dar hay'at" in Persian for Mehmed II at Constantinople in 1470.

Ali Qushji then finished "Sharh e tejrid" on Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's "Tejrid al-kalam".

Ali Qushji improved on Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's planetary model and presented an alternative planetary model for Mercury.

Ali Qushji was one of the astronomers that were part of Ulugh Beg's team of researchers working at the Samarqand observatory and contributed towards the Zij-i-Sultani compiled there.

Under the influence of Islamic theologians who opposed the interference of Aristotelianism in astronomy, Ali Qushji rejected Aristotelian physics and completely separated natural philosophy from Islamic astronomy, allowing astronomy to become a purely empirical and mathematical science.

Ali Qushji found empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation through his observation on comets and concluded, on the basis of empirical evidence rather than speculative philosophy, that the moving Earth theory is just as likely to be true as the stationary Earth theory.

Ali Qushji's work was an important step away from Aristotelian physics and towards an independent astronomical physics.