Author: Justin K. Stearns (NYU Abu Dhabi)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2021
Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe.
Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Justin K. Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world.
Challenging these depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world, Stearns uses numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences to a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in scholarly and educational landscapes of the Early Modern Magreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Early Modern Morocco.
Contents
Preface: Paths not Taken
Introduction: Narratives of Science, Old and New
A Landscape of Learning in the Far West
Excursus – The Poverty of Intellectual History as a Series of Great Men
Constructing Science in Morocco between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Excursus – The Horizons of Causality: How to Think about Causes, Nature, and Ghosts of Scientific Methods
Legalizing Science: The Authority of the Natural Sciences in Islamic Law
Excursus – Kuhn and the History of Science in Islamicate Societies
Writing the Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Excursus – Sufism and the Spiritual Life: Balancing the Exoteric and Esoteric Sciences
Conclusion