Where do magical objects—and the superhuman beings or metaphysical forces that might animate them—fit in histories of technology that concentrate on the Middle East and North Africa? Since Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts (2002), the history of science, technology, and techno-politics is on the rise in Middle East Studies. Scholars have utilized “technology” as an analytical lens to understand the dynamic processes between techno-scientific developments and political practices in the early modern and modern periods. Yet, these efforts remain confined to the realm of worldly actors—whether technocratic experts, peasants, animals, or pests—largely taking part in or being affected by the rational sciences. The Islamicate occult sciences—despite their respected status as a subset of the natural and mathematical sciences in the premodern Arabo-Persian encyclopedic tradition—remain aggressively marginalized in the current history of science, and excluded entirely from the history of technology. This panel seeks to rectify this oversight and bring Islamicate occultism studies into conversation with the ontological turn.
Magical objects (such as amulets, talismans, and grimoires) and super-, non-, or posthuman beings (like jinn, ghosts, and angels) were critical technologies in the everyday lives of populations in the Islamicate world in the medieval and early modern periods, and have remained so until the present day. With papers ranging geographically from Egypt to Iran, and temporally from the medieval to the contemporary, this panel engages scholarship in science and technology studies and new materialism to explore the “material” intellectual histories of the occult sciences in the Islamicate world. The first paper provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to occult technologies and ontologies, using as case studies a selection of amulets and talismans from late Ottoman Egypt and Palestine. The remaining four papers explore the thin line between materiality and textuality in medieval Arabic occult-scientific texts, which must be read as technology; post-Avicennan alchemy, not as proto-chemistry, but as a time-accelerating technology that both harnessed and transcended the natural order of things; talismans that functioned as “magical machines” in the early modern Persianate world, with emphasis on their utilization for medical and military purposes; and “the materiality of jinn” and the methods of their physical detection in contemporary Iran.
Taken together, the papers of this panel ask: What might a “material” intellectual history of science and technology in the Islamicate world that includes occult objects look like? How might this history allow scholars to highlight women, racial minorities, and other human and/or superhuman actors as producers of techno-scientific knowledge that may have previously been rendered invisible by solely text-based intellectual histories? Finally, this panel examines the possibilities and challenges that methodologies from the Islamicate world can offer to the ostensibly globalizing field of history of science and technology.
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Dr. Taylor M. Moore
What can the history of technology contribute to the history of science for the Islamicate context? More importantly, how can the study of the Islamicate occult sciences expand the epistemological and ontological horizons of these globalizing fields, which, despite recent advances, are still relatively narrow? This two-part paper attempts an answer to these questions through both a theoretical and a methodological approach.
The history of technology is disproportionately focused on Euro-American spaces and their largely white, male experts. The field has problematically used analytical tools developed in the these contexts to understand the production of knowledge outside of the West. The first part of the paper acts as a brief introduction to the panel, which, as a collective, joins the call of scholars interested in histories of science and technology outside of Euro-American contexts to develop new theoretical and ontological frameworks, and alternative methodological tools to challenge how the field has traditionally conceived of hierarchies of scientific knowledge and notions of a disenchanted, industrial modernity. To do so, it shows how magical objects and superhuman beings were agentive technological conduits that blurred what enviro-tech historians have termed the “illusory boundary” between humans and their worldly environments -- with dramatic implications for the relationship between the material world and the realm of the unseen in Islamicate societies.
The second half explores the methodological possibilities of using magical objects as historical sources and the previously occult(ed) ontologies their examination render visible, using as case studies a selection of non-written amulets and talismans acquired by anthropologists and private collectors late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt and Palestine. It investigates a category of magical knowledge known as ‘ilm al-rukka, or the science of old wives -- which primarily utilized magical objects and other non-literate forms of occult knowledge -- to highlight lower-class women, enslaved and free black Africans, and superhuman beings as primary producers of techno-scientific knowledge who have heretofore been rendered invisible in Islamicate occultism studies specifically and global science and technology studies generally.
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Dr. Noah Gardiner
Research focused on material culture often draws sharp distinctions between materiality and textuality, with the world of things proffered as a concrete alternative to the airy realm of discourse. Medieval books of magic, however, can fruitfully complicate this quite modern dichotomy. As European medievalist Richard Kieckhefer observes: “A book of magic is also a magical book. It not only tells how to perform magical works, but shares in the numinous qualities and powers of the rites it contains.” Such a conclusion indeed seems irrefutable with regard to the tradition of Latin necromantic grimoires Kieckhefer studies. Many such books even included a text, Liber consecrationum, detailing days-long rites of fasting and prayer for consecrating the book of magic to ensure the efficacy of operations undertaken with it. This paper seeks to test the applicability of Kieckhefer’s maxim on magic books to medieval Islamic contexts by focusing on three major occult works: Al-Sh?mil f? ba?r al-k?mil by Mu?ammad b. A?mad al-?abas? (d. 482/1089), Sirr al-makt?m f? mukh??abat al-nuj?m by Fakhr al-D?n al-R?z? (d. 606/1209), and La???if al-ish?r?t f? al-?ur?f al-?ulw?yat by A?mad al-B?n? (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232-3). As we will see, these Arabic works say relatively little about the book qua magical object, but they communicate a great deal about interactions of text and matter. Dwelling on key points from each work, as well as manuscript evidence for the use of such books, the paper elucidates a complex spectrum of relations between names, words, letters and other signs, texts and books, and subtle and dense aspects of human and nonhuman bodies. Though Kieckhefer’s maxim is found wanting, it is ultimately suggested that what first seems a gulf between medieval European and Islamic contexts is rather a matter of small degrees of conceptual difference and greatly differing textual economies. This paper aims to be significant contribution to the study of medieval ontologies, and draws out important points about Islamic occultism, Sufism, Arabic manuscript culture, and relationships between materiality and textuality in medieval thought.
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Mr. Nicholas Harris
Ibn Sina (d. 1037) famously denied the veracity of alchemy. He denied alchemy beause he denied the ability of human beings to transmutate one species into another through natural means. Considering the stature of Ibn Sina, as well as the incisiveness of his argument, proponents of alchemy were bound to respond, and they did in a number of directions. Some alchemists, like Abu al-Qasim al-‘Iraqi (fl. 13th cent.), would sidestep Ibn Sina’s objections by claiming that all metals were a single species, thus effectively removing transmutation from alchemy. Other alchemists, like Aydemir al-Jildaki (fl. mid-14th cent.), would respond by transforming what kind of practice alchemy was, shifting the focus from a material technology to a temporal technology.
While earlier alchemists tried to understand and manipulate the powers and potentialities that lie within the earth and within (the structure of) matter, post-Avicennan alchemy could become a technological vehicle for controlled acceleration, for localized time contraction. They respected Ibn Sina’s dictum that human beings could not transmutate on their own, due to the impossibility of knowing the differentiae (fasl) which define one species against another, but then turned their attention to transmutations that were already naturally in progress. Acceleration thus replaced fabrication as the primary alchemical function. Alchemists would claim to do what nature normally does, whether it be growing gold or gestating a fetus, only much, much faster.
This paper will argue that the alchemists’ goal of outstripping nature was considered to be fundamentally predicated on the ability to quicken time within their flasks and stills, both by the alchemists themselves and their critics. Thus we can appreciate in later Islamicate alchemy the beginning of a now familiar trope in science and technology studies: the difference between the natural and the artificial and thus the border of nature.
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Dr. Matthew Melvin-Koushki
The Islamicate occult sciences — despite their respected status as a large and coherent subset of the natural and mathematical sciences in the premodern Arabo-Persian encyclopedic tradition — have been aggressively marginalized in the current history of science; but they have been utterly disappeared from the history of technology. Such acts of historiographical prestidigitation, however, merely reflect the bizarre persistence in Islamic Studies of the 19th-century colonialist definition of Magic as a doomed and delusional attempt to control the world, and hence bad Science, bad Religion and bad Technology in equal measure. But to accept this positivist dogma is to exchange empiricism for ideology. As a vast textual and material record testifies, a large percentage of Muslims historically depended on occult technologies to further their scientific endeavors or improve their daily lives—and continue so to do. Their histories too must therefore be written.
As empirical corrective, this paper presents as test case several representative occult-technological operations detailed in a selection of early modern Persian grimoires, naturally unpublished, many of which are explicitly imperial in tenor. The emphasis will be on Timurid and Safavid manuals, and particular attention will be paid to those talismans built for military and medical purposes — two fields of undeniable technologicity. While these magical machines obviously did not always work (like machines today!), at times they did, according to contemporary observers. A comparative study of those talismans reported to be successful by persophone historians and the methods of their construction and operation as detailed in relevant grimoires thus promises to be instructive. Most crucially, it is only by studying such cases that we modern, reflexively positivist historians can finally explain why, in the early modern Arabo-Persian scientific-technological tradition, such applied disciplines as engineering (‘ilm al-hiyal), war machines (alat al-harb) and even agriculture (‘ilm al-filaha) could be legitimately classed as occult sciences.
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Alireza Doostdar
Contemporary Iranians sometimes encounter jinn through sensations that range from the subtle to the traumatic. These include a furtive shadow in one's field of vision, the dilation of the pupils, feelings of heaviness, a fleeting whisper in the ear, bruises on the body, and even sexual violation. As real as these sensations can feel, those who encounter jinn also regularly doubt them, sometimes going as far as questioning their own sanity. That is, they recognize that their encounters with jinn are quite different from the more straightforward, taken-for-granted sensations of everyday life: the sight of a tree, the texture of bread, the voice of a stranger at the grocery store, and so on. It is not just that the sensations associated with jinn are extraordinary (in the way that, say, the sensation of tremors from an earthquake are extraordinary), but also that these sensations are inextricably entangled with questions about the very existence of jinn, and therefore also with questions of belief and doubt. In my paper, I examine concrete examples of jinn encounters in Iran to ask how we might think seriously about the materiality and sensousness of jinn experience while avoiding the pitfalls of a naive realism too often embraced by proponents of the ontological turn. One way forward is to begin with the uncanniness of jinn sensations as an opening onto the terror of coming to grips with what Eugene Thacker calls the "world-without-us," a world beyond ordinary taken-for-granted experience that neither scientific nor any other kind of understanding can grasp, a world thus approached best, Thacker argues, through horror.
