Shīrāzī One of three major works Shīrāzī  wrote on theoretical astronomy (hay’a): the Nihāyat al-idrāk fī dirāyat al-aflāk (The highest attainment in comprehending the orbs), was dedicated to the vizier Shams al-Dīn al-Juwaynī (who may have been responsible for his judgeship) and completed in November 1281; It  has a four-part division: an introduction, a section on the structure of the celestial region, a section on the structure of the terrestrial region, and a section on the sizes and distances of the celestial and terrestrial bodies. The Nihāya is the longest of the works, at some three hundred or more pages in manuscript. It tends to present more of the work of Shīrāzī’s predecessors than does the the Tuḥfa. E. S. Kennedy noted a number of innovative astronomical models in the Nihāya. Shīrāzī’s gives high praise to astronomy in his introduction to the Nihāya and echos Ptolemy who, in his introduction to the Almagest, referred to physics and theology as guesswork as opposed to the true knowledge offered by the mathematical sciences. [F. J. Ragep]
