ABSTRACT

At the time of the appearance of the supernova, Egypt was under Fatimid rule. There was much emphasis on education and learning. During the rule of Caliph Al-Hakim, in AD 1004 to be specific, Dar al-‘Ilm was founded in Cairo. Before Egypt’s house of learning, the Abbasid dynasty, which had replaced the Umayyad dynasty with its center in Damascus, began leading the Islamic empire in AD 750. The Arabs in some faiths within the fold of Islamic culture and rule in various dynastic regimes from al-Andalus to Damascus to Baghdad to Cairo were absorbed by learning, knowledge, and scientific research that blended into poetic architectural feats and monuments of grandeur and beauty. From Ibn Radwan’s observational data on the supernova a team of English and Australian astrophysicists was able to narrow down the area of sky in which the supernova would have occurred.