Astrology has had a deep and pervasive influence on the thought and culture of the Arabs and Persians; and it has also had effects on Arabic literature in that many metaphors and other tropes are based on the ideas and technical terminology of astrology. In another respect too it has been influential. Starting from the initial, now discredited, premise that astronomical events have a reflection in sublunary events, the astrologers sought to develop principles for the practical application of this premise by methods which include the matching of observed astronomical events with actual human events. This methodology, of relying on observation as a criterion for establishing general principles, is a strictly scientific one, and was a fruitful forerunner of the observational technique characteristic of true science and especially noteworthy in, for example, the clinical approach to medicine of Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī. At the same time, it must not be supposed that astrology had a total dominance over Arab thought. At all periods there were individuals who, for either religious or purely intellectual reasons, rejected the initial premise of astrology and consequently the whole of the art.

THE SOURCES OF ARABIC ASTROLOGY

Methods of predicting the future on the assumption that the motions of the heavenly spheres are the efficient causes of changes in the sublunar world of the four Empedoclean elements were developed in Hellenistic Egypt, and became the “science” or “mathesis” of the Roman empire; thence it spread to India and to Iran.