Sonja Brentjes

This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of “Western” science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi.

En este artículo se estudian historias sobre gobernantes y príncipes de tres dinastías - ‛abbāsí, normanda y timurí – y su representación narrativa como conocedores de las ciencias matemáticas, la geografía y la historia. Se argumenta que constituyen un conjunto de formas positivas de aprobar o impugnar el conocimiento en esas sociedades, prescribiendo jerarquías de formas de conocimiento y jerarquías de gentes e instituciones que deciden acerca de la veracidad del conocimiento. Se sugiere que esas historias comparten su origen y significado en un contexto de propaganda legitimadora para varios gobernantes y príncipes. También se afirma que el valor y la posición del conocimiento científico en esas historias difieren, empezando por lo que en apariencia eran los intereses personales de un gobernante hasta su integración en lo que se consideraba necesario para la educación de un príncipe y la conducta cultivada de un gobernante. Por tanto, esas historias sobre conocimiento y gobernantes presentan imágenes del conocimiento que delinean el status de los sabios en esas tres sociedades, definiendo posibilidades y estableciendo límites para el aprendizaje y los campos de estudio que se podían practicar.

Este artículo estudia el mecenazgo cortesano de las ciencias de los antiguos en determinadas sociedades post-clásicas del ámbito cultural árabe y persa. El autor muestra que un gran número de fuentes históricas cuestionan la idea, muy extendida, de que ese mecenazgo desapareciera en las sociedades post-clásicas, y analiza a ese respecto las similitudes y las diferencias entre los períodos clásico y post-clásico en general, y entre distintas dinastías del período post-clásico en particular. Indaga también qué disciplinas y resultados financió y favoreció ese mecenazgo, y a través de qué instituciones y normas se ejerció, comparando sus dos principales escenarios: la corte y la madrasa. Como conclusión, sugiere que la hipótesis de que la desaparición o el debilitamiento del mecenazgo causaron el llamado declive de las ciencias de los antiguos debe ser revisada.

During the last two decades, it has become fashionable not merely to write about issues concerning the exchange of knowledge between Jesuits and China or the acquisition of goods and knowledge in the Iberian colonial empires, as was previously the case. Historians of science now direct their attention also to other areas of the globe, where such processes took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Depending on their specific expertise, they focus on Dutch trade in what is called today Southeast Asia, networks of knowledge in the Mediterranean or in the Transatlantic world or on colonial institutions in the western parts of the Spanish colonial empire. The actors relevant to these broader historical explorations are mostly men from a selected number of states in Christian Europe. The exclusion of most parts of the world, among them many parts of Europe, from these new narratives continues to be their most glaring deficit.1 In this paper, I will highlight the continued, even if at times submerged, existence of Eurocentric views and attitudes as expressed in some highly appreciated publications of the last twenty years.

This paper investigates the affiliation of Book I of the Latin translation of Euclid's Elements attributed to Hermann of Carinthia with the Arabic transmission of the Greek mathematical work. It argues that it is a translation of a text of the Arabic secondary transmission, that is, of an Arabic edition mixed with comments. Two methodological claims are made in the paper. The first insists that the determination of a text whose transmission was as multifaceted and complex as the Euclidean Elements needs to be based on a systematic investigation of entire books rather than on selected theorems or diagrams of global, mostly structural relevance. The second claim starts from the experience that almost all results regarding the place of a particular document in a chain of transmission are conjectural. It acknowledges that individual results are more or less persuasive, depending upon the qualitative status of the argument. It suggests that the quantitative accumulation of similarities, differences, errors, regularities, or peculiarities allows one to recognize patterns and thus improves the reliability of judgment.

The ArgumentThe “raison d'être” of this paper is my dissatisfaction with current portrayals of the place and the fate of the so-called rational sciences in Muslim societies. I approach this issue from the perspectives of West European visitors to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show that these travelers encountered educated people capable of understanding and answering their visitors' scholarly questions in non-trivial ways. The travels and the ensuing encounters suggest that early modern Muslim societies and their institutions, their ways of producing knowledge, the types of their knowledge, and their material resources contributed important elements to various early modern West European approaches to gaining knowledge about nature, history, and politics.