This paper examines the manuscripts that were taught and studied, copied and commented upon, by scholars engaged in the gharib (‘less common’ or 'unusual') sciences like mathematics, logic, astronomy, and divinatory arts in 18th- and early 19th-century Cairo. Using biographical dictionaries from the period as well as manuscripts in the gharib sciences and commentaries on such texts, I examine the chains connecting people to texts in the broader Islamic scholarly context seeking to understand the proliferation of manuscripts in these subjects from this period. This period prior to Bonaparte’s invasion and occupation of 1798-1801 has been dismissed as an ‘age of commentaries’ suggesting that little new or valuable work was produced. The French occupation has been argued as playing a key role in bringing the sciences to Egypt, a claim first made by Bonaparte and his compatriots. I suggest an alternate reading of the commentary tradition and the pre-1798 landscape of al-'ulum al-ghariba, placing both in a social and intellectual context. I argue that authoring a commentary on an earlier work or another commentary (a supercommentary), functioned as a form of intellectual development and was also an effective means of attaching oneself to a prestigious author and text, and a significant cross-temporal community of others linked to that same text and author. Additionally, I use case studies of individuals and manuscript traditions to highlight the intellectual and moral values such as verification and simplification in scholarly practice of the gharib sciences. In conclusion, I suggest the value of re-integrating the gharib sciences into our analysis of the social and intellectual history of this period. The new periodization proposed in this panel suggests that rather than see disinterest in or distancing from scientific or rational thought preceding and even enabling European intervention, we might instead find evidence that pursuit of the sciences became more polarizing in Islamicate societies as a result of increasing European intervention and direct attempts to limit the authority of the ulama. More attention to active study of the gharib sciences among a prominent minority of intellectuals offers the potential to reframe our questions of “response”, “adaptation” or “rejection” of science in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.