Mulla Mahmud Jaunpuri (; 1606–1651) was an important Indian natural philosopher and astronomer of the 17th century under the reign of

Shah Jahan Shah Jahan I, (Shahab-ud-Din Muhammad Khurram; 5 January 1592 – 22 January 1666), also called Shah Jahan the Magnificent, was the Emperor of Hindustan from 1628 until his deposition in 1658. As the fifth Mughal emperor, his reign marked the ...

. He was from a family of Hindu astrologers who converted to Islam under the patronage of a Sufi saint during Akbar rule. Book II of his classic ''Shams-e-Bazeghi'' is on theoretical astronomy, where he raises doubts about the

Ptolemaic system In astronomy, the geocentric model (also known as geocentrism, often exemplified specifically by the Ptolemaic system) is a superseded description of the Universe with Earth at the center. Under most geocentric models, the Sun, Moon, stars, an ...

. He discusses various views on the spots of the Moon, refutes them, and advances his own theory that these are some tiny bodies on which the Sun's light does not reflect. He has a number of works on natural philosophy and logic to his credit. It is related that he requested Emperor Shah Jahan to sanction a place suitable for setting up of an observatory but as the emperor was busy in wars and other state problems he could not get enough time to examine the feasibility of the project. His work ''Shams-e-Bazeghi'' is supposed to be the most important work of an Indian in natural philosophy written in Urdu. The original title was ''Hikmat-e-Balegha'' but the author himself elucidated the contents and named the revised version ''Shams-e-Bazeghi''. In this treatise, he refuted the doctrine of atemporal origination (''huduth-e-dahri'') proposed by the Iranian philosopher

Mir Damad Mīr Dāmād () (c. 1561 – 1631/1632), known also as Mir Mohammad Baqer Esterabadi, or Asterabadi, was a Twelver Shia Iranian philosopher in the Neoplatonizing Islamic Peripatetic traditions of Avicenna. He was a scholar of the traditional Is ...

References

1606 births 1651 deaths 17th-century Indian Muslims 17th-century Indian astronomers 17th-century Indian philosophers Hanafis People from Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh {{astronomer-stub