About the Book
The Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies provides a comprehensive survey on science in the Islamic world from the 8th to the 19th century.
Across six sections, a group of subject experts discuss and analyze scientific practices across a wide range of Islamicate societies. The authors take into consideration several contexts in which science was practiced, ranging from intellectual traditions and persuasions to institutions, such as courts, schools, hospitals, and observatories, to the materiality of scientific practices, including the arts and craftsmanship. Chapters also devote attention to scientific practices of minority communities in Muslim majority societies, and Muslim minority groups in societies outside the Islamicate world, thereby allowing readers to better understand the opportunities and constraints of scientific practices under varying local conditions.
Through replacing Islam with Islamicate societies, the book opens up ways to explain similarities and differences between diverse societies ruled by Muslim dynasties. This handbook will be an invaluable resource for both established academics and students looking for an introduction to the field. It will appeal to those involved in the study of the history of science, the history of ideas, intellectual history, social or cultural history, Islamic studies, Middle East and African studies including history, and studies of Muslim communities in Europe and South and East Asia.
Table of Contents:
Introduction Part 1: Late Antiquity, translating and the formation of the sciences in Islamicate polities (1st BCH-7th/5th-13th centuries) 1.1. Translation as an enduring and widespread cultural practice 1.2. Multiple translation activities 1.3. Translations in the mathematical sciences 1.4. Translations in medicine and the occult sciences into Arabic and Syriac and their contexts after 80/700 1.5. Geometry and its branches 1.6. The astral sciences until the end of the Ilkhanid dynasty: Attitudes, experts and practices 1.7. Algebra and arithmetic 1.8. Optics: experiments and applications 1.9. Automata and balances 1.10. Medicine 1.11. Natural philosophy 1.12. Alchemy and the chemical crafts 1.13. Geography and mapmaking 1.14. Physiognomy: science of intuition 1.15. The Hieroglyphic script deciphered? An Arabic treatise on ancient and occult alphabets 1.16. Practices of Zoroastrian scholars before and after the advent of Islam 1.17. Evaluating the past: scholarly views of ancient societies and their sciences Part 2: Scientific practices at courts, observatories and hospitals (2nd/8th-13th/19th centuries) 2.1. The emergence of Persian as a language of science 2.2. The emergence of a new scholarly language: the case of Ottoman Turkish 2.3. Imperial demand and support 2.4. The practice of pharmacy in later medieval Egypt 2.5. Ottoman and Safavid health practices and institutions 2.6. Planetary theory 2.7. Practices of celestial observation 2.8. The practical aspects of Ottoman maps 2.9. Another Scientific Revolution: the occult sciences in theory and experimentalist practice 2.10. Arts, sciences and princely patronage at Islamicate courts (4th-11th/10th-17th centuries) 2.11. Physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāset) and politics at the Ottoman court Part 3: Learning and collecting institutions – debates and methods (3rd/9th-13th/19th centuries) 3.1. Libraries – beginnings, diffusion and consolidation 3.2. Madrasas and sciences 3.3. Scientific matters in kalām (‘theology’) 3.4. Ashʿarite occasionalist cosmology, al-Ghazālī and the pursuit of the natural sciences in Islamicate societies 3.5. The role of sense perception and "experience" (tajriba) in Arabic theories of science 3.6. Logic: didactics and visual representations 3.7. Medical commentaries 3.8. Literary genres and visual representations in the astral sciences Part 4: The materiality of the sciences (3rd/9th-13th/19th centuries) 4.1. The materiality of scholarship 4.2. Three-dimensional astronomy: celestial globes and armillary spheres 4.3. Projecting the heavens: astrolabes 4.4. Medical instruments 4.5. Alchemical equipment 4.6. Water and technology in the Islamicate world 4.7. Arts and sciences in the Islamicate world Part 5: Centers, regions, empires and the outskirts (3rd/9th-13th/19th centuries) 5.1. Mathematical knowledge fields in the Islamicate world: similarities and differences 5.2. Jewish mathematical activities in medieval Islamicate societies and border zones 5.3. Patronage and the practice of astrology in al-Andalus and the Maghrib 5.4. Anwāʾ and mīqāt in calendars and almanacs of the societies of al-Andalus and the Extreme Maghrib 5.5. Scholarly communities dedicated to the sciences in al-Andalus 5.6. Post-Avicennan natural philosophy 5.7. Cool and calming as the rose: pharmaceutical texts as tools of regional medical practices in early modern India 5.8. Medical Practices and Cross-Cultural Interactions in Persianate South Asia 5.9. Pre-Modern Ottoman perspectives on natural phenomena 5.10. Scientific practices in sub-Saharan Africa 5.11. Medical practices in Tibet in inter-cultural contexts 5.12. Islamicate astral sciences in eastern Eurasia during the Mongol-Yuan dynasty (1271- 1368) 5.13. Collation and articulation of Arabo-Persian scientific texts in early modern China 5.14. The multiplicity of translating communities on the Iberian Peninsula Part 6: Encounters, conflicts, changes (4th-13th/10th-19th centuries) 6.1. Cross-communal scholarly interactions 6.2. Which is the right qibla? 6.3. Were philosophers considered heretics in Islam? 6.4. Systems of knowledge: debating organization and changing relationships 6.5. Embassies, trading posts, travelers and missionaries 6.6. The sciences in two private libraries from Ottoman Syria 6.7. 13th/19th-century narratives and translations of science in the South Asian Islamicate world Consolidated Bibliography
About the Author :
Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science in Islamicate societies and Christian Europe; she is an affiliated scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her research includes the history of the mathematical sciences, mapmaking, institutions, cross-cultural exchange of knowledge and the involvement of the arts in the sciences. Among her recent publications are Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies, 800–1700 (2018); Brentjes, S., Edis, T. and Richter-Bernburg, L. 1001 Distortions: How (Not) to Narrate the History of Science, Medicine and Technology in Non-Western Cultures (2016) and Brentjes, S. "MS Paris, Bibliothèque des Missions Étrangères 1069: The French-Arabic Dictionary of François Pétis de la Croix (1653–1713)?" Mediterranea. International journal on the transfer of knowledge, 6 (2021), 57–84.
Peter Barker (Associate Editor) is Professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma, USA. His research includes applying insights from cognitive psychology to conceptual change, and historical studies of the positive role of religion in early modern science and the cultural settings of major figures from the Scientific Revolution. Since learning Persian, he has begun work on knowledge exchanges between Safavid Persia and Mughal India. His recent publications include: "The Social Structure of Islamicate Science," Journal of World Philosophies, 3 (2017): 37-47; "The Copernican Revolution since Kuhn," in Wray K. B. (ed.) Interpreting Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 145-64, and "East-West Passages: European Interest in Islamicate Astronomy during the Scientific Revolution," in Mehl, É. et Pantin, I. (eds.), De mundi recentioribus phænomenis: Cosmologie et science dans l’Europe des Temps modernes, XVe-XVIIe siècles. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming.
Rana Brentjes (Assistant Editor) is a photo designer and curator with a MA in contemporary art history and has submitted her PhD thesis in contemporary German history at Goldsmith College, London. She has curated art exhibitions in Berlin and Brandenburg, written on Palestinian cinematography and co-edits Imagining the Heavens across Eurasia from Antiquity to Early Modernity (2023). Currently, she is digital content curator of the research group "Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens" in Department III at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
