Ottoman History Podcast - The Natural Sciences in Early Modern Morocco

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

with Justin Stearns hosted by Shireen Hamza and Taylor Moore | When you think of the history of science, what people and places come to mind? Scientific knowledge production flourished in early modern Morocco, and not in the places you might expect. This episode transports us into the intellectual and social worlds of Sufi lodges (zawāya) in seventeenth-century Morocco. Our guest, Justin Stearns, guides us through scholarly and educational landscapes far removed from the imperial urban centers of Fez and Marrakech. We discuss his new book, Revealed Sciences, which examines the development of the natural sciences through close study of works produced by rural Sufi scholars. Challenging the idea that the early modern period was one of intellectual decline, Stearns reveals the vibrant multi-ethnic, intellectual networks of the early modern Maghreb and the implications of their story for the history of science and the writing of history. We speak about paper mâché astrolabes, Borgesian fantasies, resisting the lure of triumphant narratives, and the importance of failure for creativity and innovation. « Click for More »

What does it mean to have to tell a story through the untelling of another? When you think of science in the 17th century, who comes to mind? It may not be Hassan Al-Yusi, a Muslim scholar working in a Sufi lodge, or zawiya, in a rural part of southern Morocco. These Sufi lodges, or zawiya, and the scholars who animated them are the refreshing focus of a new book by Justin Stearns, Revealed Sciences, the Natural Sciences in Islam in 17th Century Morocco. In this episode, we dive into the book with Justin. In this episode, we dive into the book with Justin. First, he takes us into the daily lives of Zalia scholars in early modern Morocco, a period when these Sufi lodges sustained their rigorous curricula in the absence of a central state.

In the second half of the episode, we will discuss the implications of their story for the history of science. Alyusi was Amazigh, the name for indigenous people in North Africa, sometimes also called Berber. Alyusi had an interesting new take on the old division between disciplines of knowledge in the Islamic world, ulum akliya and ulum naqliya, the so-called rational sciences and transmitted sciences. The former often included logic, mathematics, and astronomy, and other sciences with roots in antiquity, while the latter centered interpretations of the Qur'an, hadith, and the legal tradition. But as Justin shows, these categories were more fluid than you'd expect, and sometimes more familiar too. That's how I say at the end of the book, just to anticipate the ending, that the book fails.

The book fails in numerous ways. And it fails, and the part where I don't have to be hard on myself is when I say that it fails because of the immaturity of the field. Because the field just is not ready yet to make certain claims that it would like to make. I mean, I really want to ask you about astrology. And if you're into astrology yourself, you know, if there's any like actual interest in the occult sciences in a more practical sense. Well, that's a good question. Unfortunately, not. The more that I looked into the issue of science and the more that I became, you know, was trying to think through the occult as a countercategory by which things were defined and redefined and redeployed, the more interested

I really became in it. I have to say, I've become envious of people who do practice these arts in many ways. And I just... You don't even know your sign, Justin. Well, no, I'm a Libra. Obviously I'm extremely well balanced and you know, yeah, I got my sign. I got my sign. Yeah. But that's about as far as it goes. Gotcha. I'm Shirin Hamza.

I'm Taylor Moore. Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. Why Morocco? Why the 17th century? And, well, as we can see from other work, including that, for example, of Khaled al-Ru'ayhab, there's a lot going on in Morocco in the 17th century to the extent that it can be measured by its impact on what happens in the Mashriq or in Egypt, which usually and continue to have kind of pride of place in our intellectual history when we look at the Islamicate world. But there's also a lot of other reasons why I became very quickly fascinated with Morocco. From earlier, there was

one specific scholar, Hassan al-Yusi, who lived in Morocco during this time period. And when I became interested in him when I was thinking about plague and his own opinions about plague, but the closer I looked at Yusi, I also realized that there were a number of institutional changes happening in Morocco in the 16th and 17th centuries, which allowed us to question some of our broader narratives. And one of those was that we have a period here, a transition between two different dynasties. So there are, these are the Sharifian dynasties, dynasties which claim legitimacy by linking themselves genealogically back to the Prophet. The Saadi dynasty arises in the 16th century and unites Morocco in this sense

after a series of Amazigh or Berber dynasties had previously been ruling over Morocco. And the Saadi dynasty is in many ways quite successful, is able to defeat European powers and also to launch its own kind of imperial ambitions across the Sahara down into West Africa. But it collapses at the beginning of the 17th century with Ahmed al-Mansour's death in 1603. And with it, and this is perhaps for comparativists is interesting, in the same century, of course, that England is falling apart politically. This is also happening in Morocco. And the dynasty falls apart with Ahmed al-Mansour's death.

And it won't be reconstituted under a strong central ruler for almost another 70 years. against the kind of the colonial powers of the Spanish and the Portuguese in the north and along the Atlantic coast, and internally amongst these, the sons of Ahmed al-Mansur, but then more and more, these Amazigh or Berber Sufi lodges, which are controlling the Middle Atlas and the Anti-Atlas in the south. And so one of the interesting things here is look at all of the intellectual stuff that's happening with the natural sciences during a time period when there is no central state so this presupposes that there are other forms of funding like who is paying these guys's bills where is that coming from right and so in part it's coming from the sufi lodges are run by the kind of trade routes that you're getting with, you know, the aforementioned, you trade with West Africa in terms of gold and slaves. That's part of it. And part of it,

it just has to do with the ability to, you know, get excess value out of grazing your herds in the Middle Atlas in part of that. And in these these these sufi lodges become not just economic and military entities and undertake exploits and and the delay lodge this lodge in the middle atlas where you see has most of his his spends most of his time but also where a lot of them like his teacher almeriti who features prominently in chapter four as you know a scholar of of alchemy and astronomy. And he teaches at the Sufi Lodge. So we have these rural spaces which are becoming intellectual hubs and centers.

And so I found that that was fascinating to me. That kind of reconstitutes our understanding. And if you work on Morocco, you think of Fez and Marrakesh and these places is where it's at. That's where the scholars are. And suddenly I'm like, no, you have to go down to Tamgrut in the south and go to the Deleuze Lodge. And that's

where you're going to study if you're going to want to know what's going on, what's cutting edge at that time. And so many of the scholars in the book, they, you know, they never, they never spend much time in Fez and Marrakesh. And so that was one of this, one of the things that I was really interested in the book was exploring all of this dynamic intellectual production in the natural sciences that's taking place in this politically diffuse landscape. So that drew me to this time period. At the end of the century, in the 1670s, the Alawite dynasty will rise up, also coming out of Sijimasa, this desert Saharan town in the south and then moving north. And the Alawite dynasty will then unite under Muley Ismail Rashid.

And then Muley Ismail will unite Morocco in the shape that it more or less is today and has stayed since then. Right. They're still ruling Morocco. So that's and it's this intervening period that that I kind of cast as the backdrop, as this institutionalized learning that's playing out in urban settings, but also in these rural Sufi lodges, which have not traditionally been often discussed in terms of sites of natural science production in the Islamic world. And I was wondering if you could say more about the natural sciences themselves, or science at this time period, right? You make very clear in the book that you're mostly going to use sciences in plural, and the natural science is a very kind of

like particular category. Right, right. Maybe as part of this discussion, we can get into your choice for the title of the book. So one of the issues of when we think about the sciences or think about any form of knowledge is you want to work through sort of local or emic categories. You want to go back and you want to find what people, how they were dividing up their own understanding of knowledge. So one of the things I try to do relatively early on in the book is to get inside the sort of these categorizations or Islam, which has a long tradition in sort of the Islamicate world. And we find here in the 17th century, a number of people doing these categorizations of knowledge, Al-Yusi among them, but others as well. And then we see, so what is natural science? Natural science or natural sciences are the sciences which relate to the physical, right? So they would relate to

physical reality as opposed to the mathematical sciences necessarily. Admittedly, I blur things from time to time and bring some of the mathematical sciences in. But there is also blurring in terms of the categories that people use, especially between astronomy and astrology, for example, because astronomy technically would be a mathematical science where astrology would be a natural science

because it relates to do with the physical, you know, with the heavens and with the planets and their influence on the sublunar world. So that's that part of it. Now, the title of the book, Revealed Science, comes from the fact that at one point in Al-Yusi's Qanun, his sort of categorizations of knowledge, he sort of looks at previous categorizations of knowledge, he sort of looks at previous categorizations of knowledge. And he says, well, some people have categorized things according to, well, what is, you know, what is religiously permitted and what is religiously not permitted. And he goes through and reviews some of these previous categorizations, including that of a 14th century Granadan scholar, Ibn Juzay, but also that of the 16th century, 15th, 16th century Egyptian polymath of Sayyidi. And he says, these guys, you know,

they're really kind of off base. They're not getting this straight. When it comes down to it, the types of knowledge that are revealed, and I spend some time on this word, shara'i, right? I mean, the ones that have been revealed for like, we have sharia, which is the, you know, the Islamic law and the abstract, not in the embodiment that human beings give to it, but into what they aspire to. This is the revelation from God. And so what is shara'i is what benefits the Muslim community. That is what is revealed science. And it's all of it. So anybody who previously might maybe say would have broken down the sciences into rational, for example, and transmitted. This is the aqliya naqliya binary that we deal with all the time. He's like he rejects that.

He's just like that's not I'm not going to go into that. I'm just taking that there is revealed knowledge that benefits. And if it benefits, it's a very sort of instrumentalist, functionalist understanding of it. But he goes so far, I mean, it's worth stressing here to say you can study magic. Now, magic is something which is generally kind of a countercategory that most Muslim scholars would be like, no, you don't do that. That's not, that's a no-no. In fact, there's, and there's all, and he's like, no, actually you need to know some magic so that you can recognize magicians. Okay. This is practical knowledge. I don't know. He's not saying that people should go do magic because that involves invoking powers other than the divine. That's a clearly this, this guy is,

is highly Orthodox in that sense although i don't like the word orthodox but nonetheless so but he's saying you this we need to know something about this and that goes to show that he's thinking about knowledge in a different way than is commonly held to be the default when i presented early versions of this like lo and behold like a decade ago this was a, a sticking point for some of my audiences that somebody could be making this kind of a claim because in some ways it's pushing the limits to what some other previous scholars would deal with.

I mean, he also, he makes fun of Suyuti. I mean, if anybody who makes fun of Suyuti has a certain level of self-confidence, shall we say. Going back to the institution of the Zawiyah, the situatedness of them in the Atlas, in this sort of Amazigh context, I would love to know a little bit more about how it's relevant that, you know, these scholars are writing in scholarly Arabic in a multilingual environment. And I think so

often throughout the book, you're pointing out the limits of, you know, making them representative of some whole, that this is actually one slice of society. Perhaps you could tell us more about these zawiyas and how the ethnic and linguistic makeup of the areas they're in might have affected the history that you're telling. That's a really interesting point. I mean, in the sense that we're talking here, among the scholars that I discuss in the book,

of many of them, and it's not easily discernible in all cases, but many of them come from non-Arab Amazigh backgrounds. So there are people who would have, their first language would not have been Arabic. And yet there is a striking point in the discourses, one of Al-Yusi's later books, in which he seems to be almost, I hesitate to say alienated, but it comes to me almost that way because he says something along the lines of, I thought that the Arabs were the only people who prized genealogy and that nobody else did. Certainly not my people. But then I went and asked them and I discovered that, no, no, no, we prize genealogy too. And I'm like, wait a second. Why did you have to go and ask them? You are them. You come from them, right? outside of Fez, and his mother dies when he's young, and he asks his father to send him away

to study. And at some point in his life, he must have taken a turn to have becoming just so utterly Arabized that he occasionally felt distance from his Amazigh background. But he was not alone. I mean, this is an age in which people, scholars from Amazigh backgrounds, are using Arabic. And I take a term here from Carla Millett's recent beautiful book as a cosmopolitan language. They are reaching into the authority of this language, which is not their mother tongue, and mastering it in order to attain a certain position of power and influence. in order to attain a certain position of power and influence, so much so that al-Yusi can write works that will then travel the entire Mediterranean, which he would not have been able to do in al-Mazih,

and to reach the point where he is writing admonishing letters against Mullah Ismail, one of the most powerful leaders in the Muslim world in the 17th century. And so that is what he's able to do with his mastery of Arabic. Now, the Zawiyah are all back up to say here, Islam is often thought of as an urban religion. We think of it as taking place as the law addressing these urban social circumstances. And we forget how much intellectually gets produced in outside of urban areas. And that is what is so important here to understanding the Sufi Lajj.

Now, when did the Sufi Lodges come about in Morocco? They start under the Sa'adis in the early 16th century. And we see this proliferation, which is sponsored in part by the Sa'adis throughout Morocco in the 16th, and they just continue to grow in the 17th century. And in many ways, after the downfall of the Sa'adis, these rural Sufi Lodges maintain an intellectual network throughout morocco and moving into west africa um that that is able to sustain scholarship and students throughout the political collapse that follows of the downfall of the saadis at the beginning of the 17th century right that's one of the things i think which is so striking here and in doing that

yes many of the people participating in this process, these forms of knowledge, both spiritual in terms of the different Sufi orders there and also in terms of the intellectual transmission of the natural sciences, which we focus on in the book. They're coming from Amazigh backgrounds. They're doing this in a second language for them. language for them. But anybody knows who's been to Morocco today. I mean, the ability to shift back and forth between multiple languages is something which is only really strange in a certain American context. And most people in most parts of the world are shifting between languages all the time, from prestige languages to more colloquial languages. And that's something which is certainly going on here among the admittedly small comparatively small literate class of people in the 17th century who are partaking in this conversation which unfortunately should be also noted or that this is a a very

male a very masculine environment that the transmission of the Natural Sciences is taking place almost entirely in a conversation by men, for men. And there are one of my frustrations in writing this book, in fact was not able to find them when i was going through the the bibliographic literature for example because i spend a lot of time going through these tabakat works where the people and the topic works of course have their own agenda and promoting certain kinds of genealogies of knowledge but nonetheless it was disappointing not to find more and in that in that way these zaw These zawiyas as rural centers of learning were not exclusively institutions of natural scientific learning,

but as you show in the book, included them as a result of the way they were formulated by deeply religious scholars. But if you can tell us a little bit more about how and why the natural sciences were taught at these zawahiyyat, that would be wonderful. First of all, these zawahiyyat, these Sufi lodges, clearly function as a form of social reproduction of the Sufi orders themselves, which have their own economic bases in a variety of places. But when we think about what it gets taught there, first, it's worth acknowledging right off the bat that the natural sciences are not the focus,

right? I mean, I tried to go through the genealogical literature to show that between, you know, roughly seven and maybe nine percent of all scholars of the 17th century in Morocco were familiar with, had studied one or more of the natural and or mathematical sciences, right? But that is a lot of scholars for that time period. So we're still talking about, you know, easily hundreds, if not maybe a thousand people or more who are very conversant with and who see, even those who don't study them, who see them as a respectable form of knowledge, which has its own social value. So they have a certain social prestige, right? But in the Zawiyah, one consider that you would go from a traditional kind of beginning of learning,

of literacy that you develop in what we would, as an amaktab or a regional school, maybe in your village, and that you would then end up perhaps at one of these zawiyas, and you would study the classic beginning forms of knowledge, including, say, grammar, the Quran, the Sira, these types of religious things. And as you proceeded in your studies, which would go over maybe 10, 15 year period from the time, I mean, we're talking up, and so you'd be, you'd be, there is a kind of a sense of, of moving towards a graduation, although there's never really actually a graduation. They're simply accumulating a series of EJASs from different

teachers over time. You would be able to specialize more in different ways, or as in with UC itself, maybe you'd study a little, you study with a specific scholar that scholar is interested in a whole range of things and then you might end up studying as he did you would study the religious sciences but you would also then study astronomy for example or you would study mathematics in different ways you would study logic you know and and so you would study medicine as well right so that you would the institutionalized study was not that there was like a fixed university curriculum as we might have in the European Middle Ages with a quadrivium and a trivium and all of these kinds of things, but rather that there would be individual pathways into various

forms of knowledge and that individual students would then choose to sit with and study with professors or teachers in this context whom they were interested in. with and study with professors or teachers in this context whom they were interested in. And I include one anecdote about, not related to one of the supilages, but to in Fez, I think at the Karawain, where a certain scholar, you know, he would teach what he was paid to teach for that morning, and then he would turn around after things were over and teach what he wanted to teach. And at that point, other students could come in and sit and be like, oh, yeah, I'm here for the after class study session, so to speak. And so that's going on as well. So in that sense, from other anecdotal evidence, we get a sense that a lot of the teaching and the studying happened relatively early in the morning and then later in the afternoon,

and there's a break in the middle of the day, especially in the Zawai'i and Sufi lodges that it's not clear but I mean I assume that many of the students would then go off and do other types of work during that time period like the actual work that's needed to sustain the lodge for example but unfortunately the number of anecdotes where you get these snapshots of social reality are relatively few and far between. So yeah, that's what it comes down to in terms of a quote-unquote curriculum. I mean, much has been made of the fact that this is not perhaps as institutionalized or systematic as other forms of curriculum that one might find, because one always gets drawn back to European universities as kind of the norm, the base here. But what we see in terms of what we don't have in Europe, we do have in the Muslim world.

My Europeanist colleagues always get a little bit nonplussed when I ask them. I'm like, don't you guys have collections of biographical information on every single scholar who lived during a certain time period? I mean, isn't that the best? And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, but that's, that's what we have here. I actually have social information on every single person for like the entire 17th century. If I cross, if I, you know, cross reference all these different regional versions, I mean, not every single person, but I'm capturing so much more. They have nothing to go to. And so in that sense we can use that information to establish you know kind i don't want to say the word quantitative but i do because it has such a social authority kind of quantitative estimates of how many people were invested in and studied these sciences but the pathways in which they would have studied the natural sciences however would have been a little

bit more informal and based on this interest of the individual students in which teachers were available to them at these institutions of learning. But what we do see is that they traveled, they would move around, so they would study. If they couldn't find a teacher in one place, they would go somewhere else. So it's not just Al-Yusi, it's many of the other people who move between different parts of Morocco and who study both spiritually with different spiritual instructors, but also other subjects in different places. And that Morocco felt that it had such a density of knowledge during this time period that some of the people I talk about never even leave the Sousse. That is to say, they never really move north of the Alice.

And they're able to say, OK, well, I studied with these people in Tarundan to Mohamedia. Then I went to Sijil Masa. Then I went over here to Tamgurut. Then I went here and I found everything I needed. You know, I never, never had to go to Fez, much less, you know, go off to Cairo or somewhere else. And I mean, just to perhaps a brief reminder that this is happening during the same time period that Morocco is becoming intellectually closely linked with West Africa, with Timbuktu,

because of the imperialist sort of ambitions of Ahmed al-Mansur and the Saadis. So al-Yusi grows up, is born just a few years, two decades after, say, Ahmed Baba Timbukti is released from house arrest and gets

to return back to Timbuktu. And he leaves behind him a legacy of Moroccan scholars and students who had studied with him. And so Ayusi is also in this entire environment. They're getting knowledge in general, not just from, it's not just coming from the east, it's also coming from the south. It's also coming from the centers of learning in the western Sahara that is moving north. So that from the Moroccan perspective of this time, you don't really need the rest of the Islamicate world. I mean, it's nice. Sure, you go on Hajj, you go to Mecca and Medina, you meet people, you come back, you tell great stories about it, you go to Egypt. But there's no, it's like, it's not, nobody's like, you have to go to Egypt, you have to go to the Levant. You have to go to the Hejaz.

No, you're perfectly at home with what's going on in Morocco itself. I mean, I think it's interesting, you know, just thinking about the kind of shift that happens with the language of science. Right. Because you mentioned in the introduction that where Arabic was the language of science in the 17th century in this moment that you're talking about when you kind of like do the zooming out to talk about the accessibility of archives you then say how more people are are uh more inclined to kind of interact with scholars of scholars of and from Morocco who write in French rather than Arabic. So it's also interesting to see kind of how what once allowed these works to travel on a different kind of non-Western centered global scale to actually is part of kind of the impetus of writing the book

now because they don't travel like that anymore. No, absolutely. I think something that I really tried to come to terms with and which I'm afraid is only really addressed in an abbreviated form in this book is how knowledge shifts between the 19th and the 20th century and what the comparatively short period of French colonization of Morocco and Spanish colonization of Morocco, comparatively compared to, say, Algeria, does to both language and understanding of what is considered to be knowledge and what is considered to be desirable knowledge. And I go over that briefly in the introduction, but the short story is that Arabic had been a prestige, not language, in the 19th century in Morocco, in the sense that you could go to a, not language, in the 19th century in Morocco, in the sense that you could go to a institution of learning, say the Qarawiyin in Fez,

you could, if you graduated from the Qarawiyin, you would get a job, you would go and work in kind of the state bureaucracy, so if you will, if you didn't go into simply also becoming a religious scholar. After French colonialism, that's gone. The Karawiyin curriculum, which had previously had contained the natural sciences, is now turned into a vision of Islam that the French understand, and that those natural sciences fall out. And then after independence, they stay out because the version understanding the curriculum that had been the colonial curriculum, this is a pretty common phenomenon in taking a look at the effect of how post-colonial states draw upon the ways in which the colonial period had imagined both Islam and other forms of knowledge. That carries on after that into the post-colonial period, except then, of course, Arabic has disappeared,

French has come in, and now if you go to the institutions previously, which had been so prestigious, these religious institutions, they no longer give you a job. They no longer give you an employment. They're not a place where you have access to the kind of social mobility that that had previously imagined. And of course, the other thing is that the zawiyas, which I focus on so much for the 17th century, had by the late 19th century had lost this kind of intellectual role which they had had in this early period

so one of the things we're seeing here is that there really is a a moment in the 17th century where the intellectual infrastructure which is set up under the Saadis in the 16th is carrying through in the 17th and then in the 18th, which I kind of stopped the book at the end of the 17th, beginning of the 18th, but in the 18th century and moving into the 19th, that rural intellectual infrastructure begins to collapse and to fall apart. And so while I did go, for example,

as one of the only sort of, I'm not going to say anthropological, one of the more interesting moments in the research for the book to the Ayishia Hamziya Zawiyah up in the High Atlas. And if you go there today, and that's where they still keep the manuscripts,

it's only beginning to be incorporated into the al-Qaf, the ministry of the al-Qaf. If you go there, and then you will still meet a descendant of the family who founded this Zawiyah in the 17th century as a kind of a spinoff of the Deleuze Zawiyah in the Middle Atlas. And now they're herders. I mean, their livelihood comes from goats and sheep and herding that.

a link to the direct to the intellectual that that infrastructure is no longer socially prestigious enough and does not come with the economic basis that it had in previous centuries. And so that's now marginalized. And that also leads to, I think, within Morocco itself, a neglect for these rural areas. So I guess, and that's another aspect, which I'll just briefly riff on, which is to say that this genealogy of decline, this understanding that the Islamic world has in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries gone into a period of intellectual decline in which the natural sciences, among other forms of knowledge, are no longer as institutionally supported or

socially supported. That narrative, which I try to correct in this book, is not only found in kind of Western Orientalist scholarship, but comes out of this joint narrative that emerges in the 20th century. And you find it also then taken up in reformers or Salafi narratives, both outside of Morocco, but also within Morocco, and among the kind of nationalist voices that argue for, you know, the postcolonial nation state, which then arises. So that's important to get that complexity in there to understand why it is that you'll find many people in the Islamicate world today who are very attracted to the very type of scientific modernity that obfuscates or does not allow us to see the kind of rich intellectual engagement that

we're getting here, for example, in 17th century Morocco, where the occult sciences and the natural sciences and the so-called religious sciences are not differentiated in hard and fast ways, but interact with each other in very productive, complicated ways, as we see in my discussion of Almeriti's work, one of Aljussi's teachers. In the second half of the podcast, we get into a methodological discussion with Justin about the history of science. And here's some more wonderful stories from his book, Revealed Sciences, including the construction of an unusual astrolabe. of an unusual astrolabe. How do we tell stories of science and intellectual engagement with the natural world that do not have an end point in the contemporary? Throughout his book, Justin wrote reflections

on methodology called excurses. The excurses addressed the careful ways he approached this topic, avoiding the pitfalls of modern categories and the type of history that I'm telling here has not attracted too much attention before, and that's because disciplinarily, we have an obsession with connections and crossings and cross pollinations and whatever we want to call it. And that leads us to neglect certain types of local history. So some of the most remarkable scholarship of Morocco in the 17th century has dealt with, for example, some amazing social phenomena. Say, look, the Moriscos have arrived

in North Africa. This is amazing. These people are being, this is like the largest mass deportation at the early modern period is 300,000 people get kicked out of Spain in the early 17th century and they show up in North Africa. And so there's a lot of fun stuff to write about this. This is really fascinating stuff. But then you get focused on this connection and then you want to know what's going on with the connection. Oh, look, we have pirate states and Saleh and otherwise. We have these people who come over and then they become pirates.

I mean, pirates! Who can compete with pirates? Pirates are amazing. But all of that has led us to neglecting the, you know, one of the striking things for me, again, I go back to Al-Yusi, but not just him, Al-Meriti and so many of these other people is they're not interested in the pirates. They're not interested. They don't never mention Europeans. They never mentioned the Spanish. They're like, maybe there's a jihad somewhere. I mean, it's not a focus.

their networks, their Sufi lodges, the networks of studying and of transmission that are going on internally. And so part of the book is also trying to recover that for giving us an appreciation. And you only get that with these detailed local micro histories. And we've just haven't had enough of those is my feeling. I feel like the focus on connection, on travel, on go-betweens, I mean, this is something I think we've had, probably each of us has had so many conversations about with others in history of science that it's a fetishization of what moves over what doesn't. And part of why I asked the question about language earlier is because some of the great and interesting stories to tell are about the kinds of texts that would not be legible

outside of a certain context and the communities who would use them. And indeed, they are not fully legible to us now, like the remove of space as well as the remove of time, you know, bounds them. Like, I really just agree with what you're saying about the importance of attending closely to what doesn't move and what doesn't circulate or what circulates as Taylor was gesturing to this earlier, what circulates in a bounded way that may or may not include Europe. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And because as I was reading the book, I was thinking a lot of like the work in history of science on agnotology

and thinking about like histories of failure, right? And this idea that because something moves, that makes it important. And so I really do appreciate you like putting in context, the importance of what it means for intellectual history and history of science to follow something that might move in unexpected ways, or not move at all, right? Or move in trajectories that we can only understand through a kind of hyper local, or like a super situated understanding of what's going on on the ground locally. or like a super situated understanding of what's going on on the ground locally. There's always, there are pretty salutary motives to why we were focused on things that move, or why we do. And part of it is to understand, you know, the general historiographical shift to say that modern science doesn't come about within Europe. It comes about as an interaction of

European countries with these other places. We have to understand these other actors. And that then leads us into this constellation of, well, let's track movement. Let's look at what's going on in the colony and how it affects the metropole and vice versa and all of these things, which I understand. I think that that's an understandable and a very positive historiographical shift. But the people whom I'm interested in in this book, their understandings of science generally don't do too well by the time we reach modernity. That is to say, the types of knowledge that they're pursuing no longer get grafted onto that sort of teleology, which leads you to modern science. They end up in places that we would now that people would call pseudoscience, or when you think about,

again, the occult, right? And that then means you're telling another story genealogically. And that's where I did find the local that you're talking about to be useful. But I just wanted to stress those broader tensions, because one of the main things the book really wrestles with, and I'm still not happy with this necessarily, is how do we tell stories of science and intellectual engagement with the natural world that do not have an endpoint in the contemporary? And that's where The Local brought me back to The Local. I think it's very powerful that you start the book off saying like, the book is going to begin with an untelling of a story so that I can tell the story that I want to tell. And part of me wonders how you think,

I guess, the book could have been approached differently if you didn't feel like you had to respond to these very strong narratives of what history of science is supposed to look like. These narratives are so deeply entrenched that to just prove that the work that you want to do is important, you have to like move, like kind of clear the ground to situate these scholars. And so maybe if you could just talk more about that process, or like, what does it mean to have to tell a story through the untelling of another? I think I was trying to be as clear as possible to the reader, but first and foremost to myself about what happens when we start to tell any story about science or basically about anything. about anything but this this comes a great deal out of teaching of walking into a classroom and trying to say and now I'm going to explain to these kids who whether they realize it or not I feel are part have imbibed the gospel of

science that we I mean to you as far where a shakari's term to imbibe the go the gospel of science that has come with modernity where we treat this as a prestige form of knowledge and and and it And it's very prominent. I mean, in the UAE where I live, the government prides itself on its ability to send satellites to Mars and modern, you know, all of these things. And it has a narrative here, as it does elsewhere, of these forms of knowledge being having an Islamic origin or coming from the Islamicate world. Or, you know, this is where I briefly engaged in the preface with the Thousand and One Inventions in terms of seeing where these narratives are and where they come from. like to be sitting in the 17th century and studying astronomy or studying astrology or practicing lecherism in Morocco? How do I make that world approachable? How do I make that world understandable? Well, first, I'm going to have to get rid of all of the kind of the surface noise

that we have and the surface noise which is built into all of the modern forms like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Don Cosmos, or Steven Weinberg writing his, you know, kind of a triumphalist understanding teleology of modern science. And that's, you know, just thinking through that, let's see what happens if I push that away and try to go back to first principles, and then we have to, and that's where the excursi or the excursuses came from in the book is this moment where I kind of want to turn to the reader and say, look, there are some basic things here that we kind of have to address and to articulate so that we can move on into these more precise parts. And so I'm trying to figure out, I mean, how to do this, because it's hard. It's really hard to

untell stories that we all inherently believe in. And so it's funny, you asked me, like, what would have been like if I hadn't felt I had to do that? And I can't, I mean, this is a failure of imagination on my part. I can't really imagine it. I don't know what that would be like, because it would be living in a different world. But in the end, I then invoke Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions to find something, to find some kind of template. And so in the Darwinian tree of life metaphor, which he uses in that, that's what I come back to. That's the thing that I can say is that, look, scientific knowledge makes its way out there. It goes out and it can develop in different ways which are non-teleological. And this is what we're looking at here in the 17th century in morocco anyway you know in addition to to situating these scholars

within a larger intellectual trajectory in morocco you also very creatively choose passages that give us insight into textures on the ground, whether it's scholars studying together outside of mosques, or, you know, actually the kinds of objects they might make with the knowledge of the natural sciences that they learn. And an actually very interesting object that we that we would like to hear more about is El-Roudani's paper mache astrolabe. So El-Roudani is this scholar from the south of Morocco who then ends up at a certain point in his life after studying with Meriti the same Scott teacher of Al-Yusi so these guys all know each other he then leaves and travels to um Mecca and to the

Hejaz and settles uh there and stays there the rest of his life um but he is visited by a traveler Alayashi who was also studied at the Dele Ziyah in the Middle Atlas and who then went off and founded his own Zawiyah in the High Atlas, which became known as the Ayashiyah Hamzawiyah Zawiyah or Lodge. priest meets up again with, or meets actually for the first time, Rudani and finds that he is in his, that he's a very spiritual man, does not go out very much, but that in his spare time, in order to sustain himself and to make a living, one of the things he does is to use his knowledge of astronomy and is to produce these objects. And he produces these astrolabes, he then he sells right and so he ayeshi then this moroccan traveler describes the the astrolabe as follows i was told that he took paper placed it into water until it dissolved and became like paste he then placed gum arabic in water until it dissolved and mixed it well with the dissolved paper one then takes a sphere and endeavors to wrap it so that all parts

are equally covered in relation to wrap it so that all parts are equally covered in relation to the center so that if you placed it on a smooth surface, it would stop at a single point. I was told that it kept breaking for him until he took a nail and placed it in its center and then took half of a brass circle, both sides of which were pierced, and placed both sides on the ends of the nail that extended beyond the sphere's two sides. He then began to go around the half of the mentioned that extended beyond the sphere's two sides. He then began to go around the half of the mentioned circle with the paste until there were no more protrusions. The indentations were filled and it became a perfect circle. He then painted its surface

white, wrote on it what needed to be written, and brushed over the writing with lacquer. Because of this, the writing would not be erased, even if it became wet from the hand's sweat or some other source. The sphere above it is made in the same fashion save that it is pierced while still wet i love that description i honestly don't know what that object is going to look like that he's describing because i find it quite complicated so when you go and check out the picture it i still struggle but i have a much better understanding of what's going on because here you have the spherical astrolabe and it has a holder which i think is what he's describing which envelops it and which can be used in a certain way and so that's this is this is um you know as i

said uh my gratitude to to professor david king for for that reference and also telling me pointing out that it's a universal astrolabe that's been depicted and not a spherical astrolabe. So there's still some questions to be answered there. But the fact that we have this description of this Moroccan who had made his way east and who was then visited by this other scholar and who takes this all down is wonderful. Now, Rudani's interesting for another reason,

which is that he, again, exemplifies a type of scholar who could be well known for his Hadith criticism and his religious scholarship, as well as his work on astronomy, for example. So we see that these are not two separate worlds, but that people like Meriti as well, who writes these works of alchemy, or has this long treatise, which did not make it into the book,

but on refuting sorcery, the Ibtal al-Sahar, that he also writes works on sort of prophetic, on the Shahada and on theology and other things. So people are moving in and out of these various forms of knowledge,

which, as we remember, Al-Yusi, all called revealed. This is a thread that if we pull on it, we'll discover that in many ways I'm not a historian of science in that sense, which is kind of bizarre to say because the field is relatively small and so anybody who wants to play in the sandbox kind of gets in because it's so small. But I come from a background as an intellectual historian. And in that sense, that's how I approached thinking about the plague and about medicine. And then when I turned to this broader book and started to look at these issues, I was really coming at it from the perspective of intellectual history and not from the perspective

of somebody who said, who say had really good technical understanding of astronomy or astrology or any of the occult or non-occult natural sciences. And I think that is something I try to address in the book, but it also says something about the different approaches that people are taking to the field, all of which are complementary and which need to be there. I think you end up speaking on a bunch of multiple different levels about the history of science in the book. And so if you could maybe tell us more about that process, what you think being an intellectual historian

actually brought to your understanding of the history of science and your ability to kind of really tell this complex and multi-layered story that is at once historiographical, but also like very historical, very gritty, and in the sources. Yeah, I think it comes out of two things. The first thing, of course, and I, you know, is that when you talk about science, you're never talking just about science, you're talking about a lot of other things. But science is such a form of prestige form of

knowledge in modern culture that you're always setting up certain civilizational cultural claims when you bring in the word science, right? We all know this, unfortunately, almost too well. And so that's something that had become, I did not know that until I wrote the book on plague and started thinking about, oh, I see, we're now we're using how people respond to plague as an index of how quote unquote, civilized, rational, modern they are, right? So that's interesting. What if we broaden that and take a look at the more broad, just natural sciences in general? And that's what dragged me into early modern Morocco.

And then in the process, first you run into the fact that actually we don't know anything. How would we write such a history if we actually knew things? We're going to have to start really small. We need, you know, in a Germanic sense, I have this sort of almost Borgesian fantasy of getting like hundreds of graduate students and saying, okay, you get Morocco between 1600 and 1620. You get it between 1620 and 1640. And just going through the entire Islamic world like that, everybody gets like a 20-year period and doing this thick description of the whole thing. I mean, that's the kind of multi-generational hundred-year thing that only somebody in kind of the German academy where they do these dictionaries that take like a half century to complete.

That's what we would need in some ways to do that. ways to do that. But since that's not going to happen, at least we can stop. We can take a look at a narrow period or comparatively narrow, right? And then go down and try to build up, like what are the actual institutions of learning? Where is, in many ways, what are the intellectual trajectories? How do we tell, you know? And then you start running into all of these other things. And that's what I started getting really interested in because I've been thinking about the relationship between so-called science and religion for a long time. I teach classes about it. And then you're like, well, what is religion? I mean, all these basic questions start coming in and say, well, now I have to explain what, you know, what is religion? You know, Sufism? Is it theology? Is it law? What is it? And then, so that's a big part of the process.

A big part of the process of writing this book was just really coming to terms with and thinking about how we really don't know anything. And that's how I say at the end of the book, just to anticipate the ending, that the book fails. The book fails in numerous ways. It fails. And the part where I don't have to be hard on myself is when I say that it fails because of the immaturity of the field, right? Because the field just is not ready yet to make certain claims that it would like to make. And when we do make those claims, we always overpromise and we make these broad generalizations and we fall flat on our faces. So we have to kind of take the step of humility and move back and then move forward very slowly. But we don't like to do that in the academy because big claims sound so much cooler. So that's the problem. And so as an intellectual historian, those were the kinds of things that I was wrestling with in the book.

First of all, where does this narrative of quote unquote decline come from? And then how can we confront it with something more complicated and complex? And that's the part of the failure of the book where it might be on me. That is to say that I think it's really hard to articulate that alternative narrative to decline, right? And I think that's something our field in general is still struggling with. We all agree the decline narrative is awful. It doesn't make any sense. It's based on all these Eurocentric problems and all of that. We're much less effective in creating an elevator type soundbite version of it that we can present to people, say, doing Latin American history or Chinese history and say, no, no, not the client, this, and then show them this other thing. And I'm still, the book in some ways is my attempt of struggling to do that. And obviously it would not fit into an elevator speech as you say in one of the excursions like there's something really powerful about the narrative of like the triumph of science and the great man and it's very hard to replace that

narrative with something equally compelling um especially when we're like well science is multi-sided there's no one one timeline. But I just wanted to say, like, before we move on to more specific questions, that I think it's successful in a number of ways. Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, I actually think that it succeeds. And it's actually, you know, thinking about esoterics as method, actually, in this kind of return to the idea that there is always something to be known, and things cannot always be fully known. There's always going to be constant rounds of questioning and inquiry, right? And, and so and that's why, again, I think you do a good job of bringing that into the writing of

history, and specifically into the writing of history of science, which can be so deterministic, which can be done in very kind of like, boring, but also pedantic fashion, right? In returning this kind of like level of curiosity and inquiry around not just the text themselves, but the structure or I guess what you call it, the political economy of archival accessibility. And also just like scholarly attention that either allows for or does not allow for them to be a part of these larger conversations. I think like that's actually quite successful and more of what we need personally. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I'm glad that that came through. I mean, as I set out in the introduction, there are these three scholars whose body of work has kind of pushed me, you know, into thinking about these things. And it's really, I think, with, you know, both the magisterial book of Khaled al-Ruwayhab, when he's really kind of laying out a way of thinking about looking at intellectual history as a change, of giving us a grammar, of a roadmap of how to think about changing shifts during the Sonia Brentes is saying, wait a second, it's not just the great men and the great texts that are interesting.

You know, let's take a look at the diffusion of material throughout society and to start thinking about these texts in a way need to be able to give ourselves the license and also, yeah, the license to go in and to tell the types of histories which don't necessarily live up to the historiographical demands of our own field, but also other fields. And I guess that's what I was trying to work through in the introduction is to explain a little bit about how we've gotten into this situation, where we are at the moment, where we place different demands upon ourselves as historians than our Europeanist colleagues. like it would be my dream to get this book translated into Arabic and I think this is actually a relatively achievable dream and then to bring it back to Morocco because I've spoken about it now with Marat too I've spoken about it in on a Moroccan kind of lecture series with other historians of Morocco Moroccans are not going to generally read English language scholarship they're francophone they'll focus on that. And then

they'll also focus on what's written in Arabic. Whereas, as you know, most of us in our field, we tend to treat Arabic as the language of primary materials and not secondary materials. So we don't spend a lot of time reading secondary sources in Arabic, at least my generation. Maybe things are better in your generation in terms of that issue. But so what, for this book, I ended up trying to sink into as much secondary material written by Moroccan scholars as I could, precisely for that reason. And I discovered that there's a huge amount of material there, albeit still framed in this certain kind of declensionist narrative that they share with the kind of French Orientalists of the middle 20th century.

And if you're interested in just that sort of scholarship, Justin has kindly shared several titles with us in his bibliography, along with all of the other references in this episode. You can check that out at our website, www.OttomanHistoryPodcast.com. Thank you for listening.