ABSTRACT
Before 1304, the year Nāsābūrī arrived in Azerbaijan, he had come to believe that religious scholarship might mandate a study of observational astronomy. Near the end of Chapter 2, I intimated that theoretical astronomy had become a locus for the tensions between the competing Hellenistic and Islamic justifications for the study of astronomy. Since Nāsābūrī was a religious scholar, his positions on critical questions of kalām can help us understand more about the ways in which religious scholars conceptualized the role of science in religious scholarship. The observational astronomy that he pursued from religious motivations raised a host of theoretical questions about humans' ability to understand God's role in the cosmos that Nāsābūrī would answer in his subsequent scientific texts. This chapter surveys Nāsābūrī's positions on key questions of kalām that proved to be relevant to his work in science.
