Al-Majriti
c. 950 CE–c. 1007 CE · Madrid
Abu al-Qasim Maslama ibn Ahmad al-Majriti was one of the leading scientists of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). His epithet "al-Majriti" means "of Majrit," the small frontier town that later grew into Madrid, where he is reported to have been born around 950 CE; the birth date is a modern estimate and not firmly attested. As a young man he traveled to Cordoba, the Umayyad caliphal capital, where he studied, taught, and worked until his death in 398 AH (1007 CE).
He is best remembered as an astronomer and mathematician. His major attested achievement was reworking the astronomical tables (zij, a handbook of tables for computing planetary positions) of the ninth-century scholar al-Khwarizmi: he adapted them to the meridian (the reference line of longitude) of Cordoba and recalculated dates from the Persian to the Islamic Hijri calendar. He also commented on Ptolemy's Planisphaerium, a Greek treatise on mapping the sphere, and worked on commercial arithmetic. Tradition credits him with founding a school of scholars in Cordoba; documented students such as Ibn al-Samh and Ibn al-Saffar carried the exact sciences across the peninsula.
Later writers, including the historian Ibn Khaldun, attributed two works on magic and alchemy — the Rutbat al-Hakim and the Ghayat al-Hakim (known in Latin as the Picatrix) — to al-Majriti. Modern scholars regard this as a misattribution, often citing a different, earlier Maslama; the historian Maribel Fierro has proposed Maslama al-Qurtubi as the likelier author.
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MadridSpain
What they did here
His epithet al-Majriti ("of Majrit") points to Majrit, the Umayyad frontier town that later became Madrid, as his place of origin. The birth year of c. 950 is a modern estimate, not an attested date; reference works say only that he was born in the first half of the 10th century.
About Madrid
Madrid, the capital of Spain, began in the second half of the 9th century as a fortress built by Emir Muhammad I of Córdoba near the Manzanares river, on the frontier of al-Andalus. Known in Arabic as Majrit, it gave its name to the astronomer and mathematician Maslama al-Majriti (d. c. 1007), whom a medieval Andalusi historian called the best mathematician and astronomer of his time in al-Andalus. Alfonso VI of Castile took the town in 1083, and in 1561 Philip II moved the royal court there; Bartolomé de las Casas died in Madrid in 1566. The university moved from Alcalá to Madrid in 1836, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal became a professor in the city in 1892.
In the same place & time
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The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Al-Majriti’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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