All of the early generations—both Companions and Successors—were in agreement that the celestial sphere is round; no difference of opinion among them on this point is known. More than one scholar has transmitted the unanimous verdict of Muslim scholars on the matter: Abū’l-Ḥusayn Ibn al-Munādī—the eminent ḥadith master who authored some four hundred works and belonged to the second tier of Imām Aḥmad’s students—Abū Muḥammad Ibn Ḥazm, and Abū’l-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī, among others. Reports on the subject from the Salaf are well known and reliably established, exactly as the Qur’an and Sunnah attest.

We have already touched on this in a previous reply, where we cited evidence from the Book and the Sunnah that accords with what sound rational calculation demonstrates.

God the Exalted says:
‘It is He who created the night and the day and the sun and the moon; each one is swimming along in its orbit.’ (Q 21:33)

He also says:
‘It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor does the night outrun the day; each one is swimming along in its orbit.’ (Q 36:40)

Commentary on the phrase: ‘each one is swimming along in its orbit.’

Imām Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Abī Ḥātim records in his Tafsīr: my father—Imām Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī—related to us, saying, Naṣr ibn ʿAlī narrated to me from his father, from Shuʿbah ibn al-Ḥajjāj, from al-Aʿmash, from Muslim al-Baṭīn, from Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, from Ibn ʿAbbās regarding the verse ‘each one is swimming along in its orbit’; he said: ‘In a whorl, like the whorl of a spindle.’

He likewise cited—from Aḥmad al-Zubayrī, from Sharīk, from Simāk, from ʿIkrima, from Ibn ʿAbbās—regarding