The Compass Chronicles. A dervish on the observatory, dancing

Every letter of an alphabet carved on stone, burned into clay tablet, or traced with ink upon a parchment resembles a road. We do not know on which palimpsest-map of the human mind did these routings exist millennia ago when they were first conceived, let alone where they led, but the scribbled letter is as much a cipher or gesture as it is a journey to some domed Xanadu of the soul.

“....Hieroglyphics were the first written language of the earth..” writes the Orientalist Thomas Maurice in History Of Hindostan (Vol 1, 1795–98). He observes keenly that “The present Chinese alphabet, when minutely examined, exhibits throughout very glaring instances of this kind. Many of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, are plain hieroglyphics; the first Aleph, has been affirmed to bear a striking similitude to an Ox: the symbol of the deity; the head, the leader, of the herd of letters.”

Through a lengthy argument (almost a pilgrimage), Maurice suggests that these letters were borrowed from symbols of the ancient zodiac, which represented moving clusters in the sky. As if some ancient watcher of these nightly sigils had extended a hand to parenthesise the constellations between her thumb and finger, compressing vast aeons separating far-flung stars into a guttural quack with the flick of a quill. It was in this Promethean way that asterisms became the template of human language — a memory that wasn’t quickly forgotten, especially by Islamic astrologers.

The zairja was a circular disc, a mechanism which (through an astrolabe pointed at the rotating stars above) by “taking into account the moment of the enquiry, generated a rhymed answer to any question posed” by a permutation of alphabets and numbers. According to the essay ‘Unscrambling T-R-U-T-H: Rotating Letters As A Material Form Of Thought’ by theorist David Link, “More than 600 years ago,” this ‘ilm al-huruf’ (the science of letters) “already provided a functionality which the constructors of search engines, and many others, are longing for today.”

An algebraic observatory of words, this mystical method to access celestial truths written in the Universal Book by descending a series of alphabetical yugas (or cycles), like a computable library catalogue, inspired Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull to create his own version in Ars Magna (AD 1290), which many Western writers of technology consider, mistakenly, to be the conceptual origin of artificial intelligence.

Islamic sources, however, point to the Maghribi Sufi saint Abu Al-abbas as-Sabti (1129-1204), all the way back to Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman (died in 656, a companion of Prophet Mohammed), and further in the past to Prophet Idris, which makes the inventor of zairja as old as the Biblical Enoch, who appeared somewhere between Adam and Noah. This means it is antediluvian: After The Fall Of Man from the Garden Of Eden, but before the Great Deluge or Flood for which Noah built the Ark. If this sequence of mythical events were true, as they are to the faithful, one must conclude that Noah carried the instrument, or the knowledge of zairja, with him on the Ark.

One of Llull’s driving motives — “to present in a single book everything that can be said…” by way of questions and answers — is no different from silicon-based “smart assistants” such as Siri or Alexa, with the methods and assumptions behind these technologies more dubious than mystical. For one, the recursive subroutines of modern programming languages (the FOR loop, or Do-While) are no different to the mechanical wheels and volvelles employed in “Llullian circles”.

Literary scholar Franco Moretti who champions the “distant reading” of classical texts as a large database through the telescope of algorithms, sounds a lot like Llull, who imagined himself a Christian astronomer of language gazing at divine memories. As early as 1816, John Keats read George Chapman’s translation of Homer and said in that same vein about the text: “Then I felt like some watcher of the skies/when a new planet swims into his ken...”

In 1370, the historian Ibn Khaldun visited the lawyer Al-Marjani in Biskra (now Algeria) to learn the art of zairja . When he wished to know if the instrument was based on recent or ancient science, the lawyer posed his question to the device. The device replied, “The Holy Spirit will depart, its secret having been brought forth/To Idris, and through it, he ascended the highest summit.”

Upon receiving an answer from the instrument, Ibn Khaldun began to dance like a whirling dervish on the terrace where they were seated. Al-Marjani recorded the moment he had asked the question by noting the ascendant degree of Sagittarius, and its degree when he had stopped turning. From the difference in the position of the stars, we know that Ibn Khaldun had performed the sama of Sufi dervishes for roughly 68 minutes.

Rohit Gupta explores the history of science as Compasswallah;

Twitter: @fadesingh

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