In the mid-18th century, the Finnish/Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, proposed a system of plant categorization based on sexual characteristics (the number of stamens, pistols), thus revolutionizing the fields of botany and natural history and inaugurating the taxonomical revolution. What had been a cacophony of naming and categorization practices prior to the advent of the Linnaeus’s methodology became streamlined and standardized. This paper considers the spread of the “taxonomical revolution” to the Arabic speaking world through an examination of Ahmed Effendi’s, al-Āyāt al-bayyināt fī ʿilm al-nabāt (Cairo: Bulaq, 1866 C.E./1283 A.H.). One of only several books published in Arabic in the mid-19th century about botany, al-Ayat offers an in-depth consideration of the most current taxonomical debates and controversies. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Ottoman modernizers were very aware of and interested in the translation of scientific texts and the adoption and proliferation of modern science. Yet there is a paucity of scholarship on 19th century Arab/Ottoman natural history. My paper begins to address this lacuna in the 19th century history of science in the Arabic speaking lands of the Ottoman Empire. It does so by situating the publication of al-Āyāt al-bayyināt fī ʿilm al-nabāt within broader scientific publication trends in Egypt and the Levant, on the one hand, and within the context of the spread of the statistical age in the region, on the other. I argue that as categorization and counting became increasingly important for the modernizing state, so too did the idea of modern classification systems in understanding and interpreting the natural world.

Biographical dictionaries and manuscript archives evidence marked attention over the 18th and early 19th centuries to what both ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753-1825 CE) and Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (d. 1791 CE) called al-‘ulum al-ghariba. Patrons, teachers, students, instrument makers and scribes actively cultivated their expertise in a range of mathematical, medical, astronomical and divinatory subjects. Traces of these individuals, circulating texts, commentaries, and their interrelationships may be analyzed to help us better understand the social and intellectual significance of these fields in the century prior to large-scale European conquest in the Middle East and North Africa. Careful analysis is called for by the scale of the material: thousands of extant manuscripts, and more than 160 individuals mentioned by al-Jabarti and al-Muradi. Moreover, this context provides new perspective on questions of subsequent reception and appropriation of scientific practitioners, texts and practices in the 19th century. This paper begins by presenting a database created from the biographies and events described by al-Jabarti and al-Muradi, supplemented by entries from manuscript catalogs. Entries document individuals, any known teachers, students or patrons, and manuscripts owned, copied, or commented upon. Queries may be organized around particular individuals, showing networks of students and teachers, or reconfigured to focus on a particular text and show owners, teachers, students, and writers of commentaries. The use of social network analysis applied to this database explores the potentials and limitations of this methodology for historical projects like this. Certainly, my database is not a complete or impartial record of the period; it relies especially heavily on al-Jabarti’s selection of individuals and inclusion of details. Network analysis allows me to compare the world of al-Jabarti’s relatively detailed references to that presented in al-Muradi’s biographies and from manuscript catalogs. At the same time, close reading of the cases where al-Jabarti, al-Muradi, or marginal comments have provided more detail allow us to access affective dimensions of this social and intellectual endeavor. In this way, this paper is informed by and contributes to digital humanities projects such as PROSOP, as well as the rich social history of the period. In the context of this panel, my paper highlights Mehmet Ali’s early 19th-century disruptions to earlier social networks, the increasing role of Ottoman intermediaries in the sciences in these Arab provinces, and the significance of this context for assessing the institutions and practices of globalized science later in the century.

Recent scholarship has identified a historically continuous colonial or “Enlightenment” subject—-rational, universal, disembodied, etc.—-that purportedly dominated Middle Eastern modernities, or at least secular ones, from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This scholarship focuses almost exclusively on two divided historical periods: the high age of European colonialism from the late 19th century to the 1930s and the post-1970s era of globalization and the rise of Islamic political and piety movements. It thus bypasses the decades around World War II, in spite of the significant ruptures that occurred during those years, not least the collapse of the European empires. One question guiding this paper is: if the “Enlightenment subject” was connected from the beginning to European colonialism and colonial thought, as numerous scholars have argued, then why aren't we more curious about how historical decolonization might have affected it? The paper focuses on theories of the unconscious developed by the Iraqi sociologist and anticolonial intellectual `Ali al-Wardi in books such as Khawariq al-Lashu`ur (Miracles of the Unconscious, 1954) and al-Ahlam bayn al-`Ilm wa-l-`Aqida (Dreams between Science and Faith, 1958). Al-Wardi drew on the contemporary disciplines of sociology, psychology, parapsychology, and pedagogy, as well as on Sufi conceptions of selfhood. He singled out Freud and John Dewey as having revolutionized understandings of the human psyche in the early 20th century: Freud had shattered the belief that our actions are governed primarily by conscious will and rational choice--which al-Wardi asserted was a peculiar global “delusion” of the 19th century--and Dewey introduced a new conception of reason, seen as rooted in people’s subjective and embodied desires. Al-Wardi connected these social-science revolutions with contemporaneous ones in the natural sciences, especially the discovery of the instability of matter and Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time and space; the revolutions in quantum physics paralleled those in psychology and both were (re)discoveries of the irrational. The theory of relativity and the theory of the unconscious are both irrational, al-Wardi wrote, because they “rend the veils of time and space” as we had come to understand them since Newton. I suggest that al-Wardi’s interventions--and perhaps, as other scholars have suggested, Einstein’s and Freud’s as well--must be read in the context of decolonization struggles and the crises they generated in post-Enlightenment conceptions of selfhood, space, and time.

How has science circulated around the Middle East since the Second World War? What practices have aided or hindered the circulation of scientific forms of knowledge, and how have these practices intersected with other processes? To answer these questions, this paper discusses the discipline of archaeology, drawing on a (micro-historical) example of archaeological fieldwork that took place in Egypt during the mid-1950s. The paper uses this example to illustrate why discussing such questions means thinking not only in terms of complex transnational networks of people and material, but also of the ways that these networks might promote and disrupt scientific (and other sorts of) action in the field. Just south of Cairo at the site of Mit Rahina, the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania spent 1955 and 1956 conducting joint excavations. In the context of the early Cold War, the project had been initiated by the American side as an attempt to develop influence in (and gain artifacts from) post-Free Officers’ coup Egypt. The Museum promoted the work in terms of the sort of Free Worldist development programs that the United States government had started to advance around the world, hoping to use developmentalist rhetoric to their advantage as Egypt itself promoted modernization. Meanwhile, flexing their authority, officials from the Egyptian Department of Antiquities agreed to provide trainees whom the Museum’s staff could tutor in field techniques appropriate to the sort of Cold War modernity that politicians in the United States wished to promote. But how did this scheme pan out? Events in the field were much less straightforward than planned. Not only the trainees at Mit Rahina, but also the (messy and waterlogged) material qualities of the site itself made the field expertise of the archaeologists in charge there look deeply questionable. Moreover, these unexpected sources of agency also called into question the authority of the Egyptian officials who, after many years of French control, had finally taken charge of Egypt’s Department of Antiquities. In the archaeological field, people and material got in the way not only of the spread of scientific practices, but also of connected attempts to spread new political norms, ultimately constituting these practices and these norms in a far less clear-cut way than might otherwise have been the case. Within a changing post-war world, the circulation of science was a complex matter.

Political interests have often motivated archaeology in the Middle East. Yet its history has hitherto failed to help us understand how today’s display of Middle Eastern archaeological finds in some of the most famous museum collections in Europe is the result of a complex transfer in which objects and cultures moved from one canonical space to another, not without facing semantic difficulties. This paper investigates the role of archaeological finds between the excavation site in ancient Mesopotamia and attempts to shift and incorporate them into European canonical traditions, namely the museum collections of Britain, France and Prussia in the 19th century. Research on the excavations and their museological reception in Europe has mostly drawn a picture of a well-organised, purposive and logical enterprise in which finding and excavating objects had a clear purpose. Little attention has been paid to the fact, that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status, even once they arrived in Europe. In exploring the circulation of cultural values and floating meanings of these objects, this paper scrutinize teleological approaches to the topic and sheds light on a shady and undefined time period between two apparently stable components in the historiography of these expeditions. By challenging narratives, which retrospectively deny the uncertainty involved in these events, the paper is an intervention of the current link between modernity, science and archaeology that has long dominated the history of archaeology in the Middle East. Such an approach takes also into account that knowledge in archaeology and heritage was intertwined with complex networks that entailed local resistance towards the European forces. The European narrative has long ignored the variety of approaches, technologies and practices towards preservation by local institutions and people, that is, non-elite, local and indigenous engagements with the material past. These vernacular discourses, e.g. practices of reworking and recontextualizing the material past, cut through chronological succession and linear time. Scholars have therefore increasingly pointed out that talking of archaeology (in the singular) as a unified practice imposes a universalist and hegemonistic discourse upon it that always links archaeology to progress and modernity. In contrast, a history of science “from below” takes into account not only scientific, institutionalized and professionalized knowledge and therefore challenges the colonial underpinnings of the foundation of archaeology as an institutionalized science, a field which in itself was by no means a stable entity as this paper will show.

The introduction into the Ottoman Empire (and thus globalization) of statistical and probabilistic risk assessment methods during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was part of broader processes of global standardization – of time, space, and energy, as well as of economic and government measures. Yet what this paper seeks to explore is a paradoxical linkage and co-dependence between this particular process – the rise of actuarial science in the Middle East – and religious transformations pointing to almost opposite ethical and epistemological horizons. How was the rise of new quantitative protocols for managing uncertainty, and the penetration of the multinational insurance industry into the Empire, enabled by the hajj, and how did actuarial science, in turn, help shape this religious experience and the community formed around it? The “democratization” of the hajj to Mecca in the age of steam resulted in fusing together the “Ummah above-” and “below the wind”, solidifying South- and South-East Asia’s role in the Islamic community. These processes reconfigured the class, ethnic, and religious profile of the Muslims traveling to the Arabia. The ordeals of steam travel (steamers made pilgrimage quicker and safer, but also more frightening), amplified also by print and intercontinental telegraphy, animated a lower-class and sufi-inflected pursuit of rizq (divine reward), manifested in communal solidarity and heterodox forms of piety onboard and onshore. At the same time, these very ordeals, instances such as maritime accidents in the Red Sea, helped establish the actuary tables for steam navigation and stabilized “risk” (the etymological derivative of rizq, but otherwise its secular-liberal mirror image) as a key organizing principle of steam navigation in these waters. Finally, these interfacing processes pushed to action Islamic reformers who sought to tilt the newly emergent “pan-Islam” toward what they regarded as rational avenues, for instance by promoting the introduction of insurance.