Revealed Sciences
Revealed Sciences
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.
- Provides a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in the scholarly and educational landscape of Early Modern Morocco
- Challenges previous depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world
- Contains numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences as concrete examples demonstrating the intellectual vibrancy of the Early Modern Moroccan period
Reviews & endorsements
‘Stearns exhibits a scholarly mastery over the subject of natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco with each section illuminating a dark spot in the history of science.’ Usman Butt, The New Arab
'This work represents a great advance in historical as well as sociological and anthropological approaches of natural sciences in Islamicate societies and opens up large perspectives for work by historians, naturalists and philologists.' Meyssa Ben Saad, Metascience
‘[This book] provides a window onto the ‘long Moroccan seventeenth century’, a vanished Islamic intellectual world of integrated natural sciences, religion, and magic. … The book is quietly Herculean in labor. Stearns successfully navigates between the Scylla of Salafism and the Charybdis of modernist scientific thinking to bring us a new ocean of discovery, one true to the original Moroccan sources.’ Ellen Amster, Isis
Product details
July 2021Hardback
9781107065574
300 pages
235 × 160 × 25 mm
0.6kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Preface: paths not taken
- Introduction: Narratives of science, old and new
- 1. A landscape of learning in the far west
- Excursus: the poverty of intellectual history as a series of great men
- 2. 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
- 3. Legalizing science: the authority of the natural sciences in Islamic law
- Excursus: Kuhn and the history of science in Islamicate societies
- 4. Writing the mathematical and natural sciences
- Excursus: Sufism and the spiritual life: balancing the exoteric and esoteric sciences
- Conclusion.
