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By Dr. Jörg Matthias Determann, Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar
Though I was born and raised in Europe, my research interests and academic studies have always drawn me to further exploration of the history of the Arab world, and in particular, the Arabian Peninsula.
Today I find myself Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar), a Qatar Foundation (QF) partner university. I am proud to say that I am the author of the recently-published book Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 2018). I consider myself very fortunate in my role and for the impact my work and teachings might have both on my students and those outside the walls of VCUarts Qatar.
Astronomy and the Arab world are two subjects that have always fascinated me, though not always when combined. As a child I nurtured a love of science fiction — a passion shared by the Arab astronomers and researchers that I spoke to while researching my book, many of whom had their imaginations sparked by Egyptian sci-fi films, or by the Syrian sci-fi author Taleb Omran. Upon entering student life, my interest in the Arab world and its history led me to pursue and attain a PhD in History from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. My subsequent bringing together of both interests was a natural fit, and led me to an area of history which I had knowledge gaps I could attempt to fill in.
What attracted me to this topic in particular is that in general, very little is known about the history of modern science in the Middle East. The narrative of the ‘Islamic Golden Age’, dating from the 8th century to the 13th century, has perhaps overshadowed more recent developments in this arena, especially modern science achievements in the Arab world from the 1950s onwards.
From a Western perspective, there is an over-emphasis on reporting negative, violent stories that focus on conflicts arising from the region. I wanted to tell a more positive story, one on a relatively unexplored subject that could inspire and uplift. I wanted to focus on the scientists, researchers, and astronomers of the Arab world — individuals who I don’t believe have received or are receiving the level of coverage they deserve.
Exoplanet discovery
I conducted many interviews during the nearly five years that it took for me to research this book, but perhaps my most valuable was my first — an interview with a Qatari astronomer, Dr. Khalid Al Subai, that occurred one month after my arrival to Doha in 2013. Dr. Al Subai is the Scientific Director, Special Projects, at Qatar Environment & Energy Research Institute (QEERI), a QF R&D institute and member of QF’s homegrown university, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. The connection that we both had to QF, in addition to the close proximity of QF’s partner universities and research institutes to one another, helped make such collaboration an easy process during my research.
Dr. Al Subai is an astrophysicist perhaps best known for a discovery made by his team, based in Qatar, the US, and the US, of six exoplanets (planets outside our solar system that orbit a star) that he named ‘Qatar-1b’, ‘Qatar-2b’, ‘Qatar-3b’, etc. What I discovered from him, and subsequently from the bulk of my conducted interviews with all participants in the book, was that these individuals consider themselves part of an Arab tradition. For example, when Dr. Al Subai named his discovered exoplanets after his home country of Qatar, he encountered some resistance from the International Astronomical Union (IAU), who are the recognized authority for assigning names to celestial objects.
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Dr. Al Subai countered, however, that most of the brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names, due to the fact the importance placed upon Arab writers and thought leaders during in the Middle Ages. His reasoning, which was accepted by the IAU, was that the naming of these exoplanets was simply a continuation of a centuries-old practice to granting names of Arabic origin to objects in the sky. That was a constant throughout my research — researchers, research institutions, and even the sci-fi artists who inspired them, drawing upon the memory of the Islamic Golden Age to revive and empower a new golden age of science in the Arab and Muslim world.
Mobilizing nationalism
Across the Arabian Peninsula, we have witnessed in recent years great technological disruption and economic development at a rapid pace. Amid such progress, and in the goals of nations to diversify their economies, the place for investment in astronomy and space exploration is not obvious. These are fields that require substantial investment and do not ensure immediate returns, yet the answers I found in Qatar and beyond was that researchers have made great strides by mobilizing nationalism and providing citizens with milestones that can evoke pride.
This link between nationalism has space exploration or astronomy has been intertwined with both fields from the very beginning — witness, for example, the ideological one-upmanship of the Soviet Union and the US during the ‘Space Race’ of the 20th century. And so we see, through the likes of the exoplanet discovery for QEERI and its ‘Fascination Astronomy’ project to nurture scientific skills in Qatari students, milestones that will inspire young Qatari youth and in time, encourage them to enter the fields of science and further down the road, become drivers of the knowledge economy.
What I learned throughout my journey, and what I hope readers will from reading Space Science and the Arab World, is that I’m very hopeful that the work that is being conducted across the region today in the field of space science can and will inspire young people. A book is never just the work of one author and I believe the individuals that I spoke to during my research are fully capable of continuing the forward momentum and inspiring a new generation to dream big.