Revealed Sciences: Religion, Science, and the Occult in Early Modern Morocco

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Event Description 

What was the social status of the natural sciences in the Arab Muslim world in the early modern period? The conventional historical narrative posits an intellectual stasis and decline in much of Islamdom in the 16th-19th centuries. Using legal, biographical, historical, theological and mystical writings of the early modern period, Justin Stearn will address the degree to which the natural sciences represented an authoritative discourse within Muslim society. To frame his findings and to be able to provide them with a rich and detailed historical context, he will focus on Morocco, a geographical area well known to me through previous research. By establishing a new narrative of the interaction between religious scholars and natural science, this project aims to provide insights to students of the history of Islam and the history of science, while considering the perils and attraction of long standing narrative teleologies in both fields.

Event Speaker

Justin Stearn, Professor of Arab Crossroads at New York University

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or historyofscience@nyu.edu for questions. 

This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences