Knowledge Translated and Vernacularized: Science, Magic, and Philosophy in the Islamicate World
Panel III-03, 2024 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 12 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
Narrating and theorizing the complex history of knowledge production, translation, and vernacularization in the Islamicate world poses many conceptual challenges for scholars. This panel undertakes a comparative examination across diverse periods and sites, through the intertwined fields of science, magic, religion, and philosophy. With a critical lens, we chart new histories of astronomy, natural philosophy, occult sciences, and material practices. Our linguistic canvas is broad, encompassing Swahili, Sanskrit, Malay, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. This linguistic diversity and its associated intellectual traditions provide a platform for initiating a conversation on analytical frameworks, conceptual approaches, and reading methodologies, ultimately offering a renewed understanding of the history of knowledge production and transmission in Islamicate societies.
Our journey begins with an investigation into the transmission of ancient Indian astronomical traditions to Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq. Fresh insights emerge by drawing on previously overlooked Middle Persian and Arabic evidence. The emphasis on continuity, exemplified through figures like Māshāʾallāh and al-Bīrūnī, enhances our comprehension of the cultural exchange between Indic and Islamic intellectual traditions. Subsequently, we delve into the 18th-century translation project of Meḥmed Aḳkirmānī, who rendered al-Maybudī’s commentary on al-Abharī’s Hidāyat al-ḥikma into Turkish. Situating this within the socio-cultural milieu of the Ottoman Empire challenges prevailing perceptions, shedding light on the convergence of philosophy with vernacularization and provincial elite patronage. This nuanced perspective provides insight into the vital role of philosophy in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. The third presentation transports us to 18th-century Islamicate Southeast Asia, examining how Arabic to Malay translations influenced the understanding of sex, piety, and regeneration among Muslim elites. Interweaving religious and natural content, the study connects these translations to medical recipes, revealing a history of everyday material practices among the minority Muslim population under Dutch East India Company rule. The final presentation immerses us in the intellectual journey of Nāṣir b. Abī Nabhān, an Omani jurist-occultist active from the 18th to early 19th centuries. Engaging in a multidimensional translation project under the patronage of the Būsaʿīdī Empire, he approached the Swahili language as both a subject of study and a medium for learning the occult sciences, integrating indigenous East African natural and cultural knowledge into the expanding Omani intellectual landscape. Collectively, these studies represent a necessary cross-pollination of epistemic perspectives, prompting new inquiries into old debates by foregrounding overlooked sources, languages, geographies, and practices.
Disciplines
Anthropology
History
Interdisciplinary
Language
Linguistics
Philosophy
Religious Studies/Theology
Participants
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Dr. Justin Stearns
-- Discussant, Chair
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Dr. Thomas Benfey
-- Presenter
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Mr. Ahmed Almaazmi
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Mr. Cem Turkoz
-- Presenter
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Genie Yoo
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Thomas Benfey
In this paper, I focus on the transmission of the Indian astronomical tradition founded by Āryabhaṭa (fl. ca. 499 CE) known as the Ārdharātrikapakṣa or “midnight school” to Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq. Drawing on evidence in Middle Persian and Arabic heretofore ignored or insufficiently emphasized, I add further support and nuance to the idea, first proposed by David Pingree and E. S. Kennedy, that the Ārdharātrikapakṣa reached the Sasanian empire through a Middle Persian work called the Arkand, which was still known in Islamic times to authors including Māshāʾallāh (d. ca. 815) and al-Bīrūnī (d. 1030).
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Mr. Cem Turkoz
This paper aims to contextualize the eighteenth-century Ottoman scholar Meḥmed Aḳkirmānī’s (d. 1760) İklīlü’t-terācim, an annotated Turkish translation of Qāḍī Mīr al-Maybudī’s (d. 1504) commentary on Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī’s (d. 1265) Hidāyat al-ḥikma. A thirteenth-century handbook of philosophy with chapters on logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, Abharī’s Hidāyat al-ḥikma was a tremendously popular work in later centuries throughout the Turco-Persianate world, eliciting numerous commentaries, glosses, and super-glosses. In the Ottoman Empire, especially from the seventeenth century onward, by far the most widely-read commentary on Abharī’s handbook was that of Maybudī, covering the chapters on natural philosophy and metaphysics. His commentary on the chapter on natural philosophy, in particular, attracted considerable interest in Ottoman scholarly circles and was studied intensively, usually with the gloss of Muṣliḥ al-Dīn al-Lārī (d. 1571) on this part. By the mid-eighteenth century, Maybudī’s commentary had a large enough readership in the Empire to warrant an extensively annotated translation into Turkish by Meḥmed Aḳkirmānī, which he dedicated to an Ottoman provincial notable. This paper first situates Aḳkirmānī’s translation within its socio-cultural context and argues that it embodies the convergence of philosophy with two early modern currents in the Ottoman Empire: the increasing vernacularization of scientific discourse and the growing patronage of scholarship by provincial elites. Next, the paper explores the intellectual context of the natural philosophy chapter of Aḳkirmānī’s translation, highlighting the main controversies in this part, identifying the intertextual references, and discussing Aḳkirmānī’s critical engagement with his sources. Ultimately, the paper challenges both the still lingering view of philosophy as a peripheral activity in the early modern Ottoman Empire and the more recently proposed claim of natural philosophy being notably absent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Genie Yoo
This presentation explores how translations influenced understandings of sex, piety, and regeneration, in this life and the next, among the Muslim elite in Islamic Southeast Asia, particularly in the spice-producing island of Ambon in eastern Indonesia. By examining and comparing two different types of Arabic to Malay translations in an eighteenth-century manuscript, catalogued as a book of “mantras,” I will examine how the island's male writers vernacularized the virtues of sexual acts, understood marital relations, and attempted to resolve tensions of bodily purity and impurity through tropes about creation and the afterlife. I will be linking these translations to medical recipes contained in the same manuscript. These recipes consisted of instructions for wielding the potency of plants as well as words, for healing common bodily ailments as well as ghostly afflictions of the mind and soul. Fragments of similar recipes circulated across the archipelago through inter-island networks, as elite Muslims integrated them from and into many existing genres. By reading the translations alongside these recipes, I will demonstrate how such intertextual readings can illuminate a history of everyday material practice in relation to the body and the natural world. While these religious and medicinal contents―including teachings and figurations of ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and Fāṭima al-Zahrā'―are found in many other parts of the archipelago, I suggest that they had particular valence for the island's minority Muslim population under Dutch East India Company rule in the eighteenth century.
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Mr. Ahmed Almaazmi
Within the intellectual landscape of East Africa, an Omani jurist-occultist named Nāṣir b. Abī Nabhān al-Kharūṣī (1778-1847) engaged in a profound debate on the sentience of trees. Under the patronage of the Būsaʿīdī Sultan Saʿīd b. Sulṭān (r. 1804–1856), he embarked on a polymathic project to understand his new East African home. His legal and ontological inquiry of whether trees possessed vegetal souls and the ability to wield magical powers over humans, was part of a multidimensional intellectual project. In his pursuit, Nāṣir authored two groundbreaking works that sought to translate the Swahili Coast through two mediums: the occult sciences and the Swahili language. Well before European colonizers in the mid-nineteenth century endeavored to document the Swahili language and East Africa’s ethnobotanical knowledge, Nāṣir took the initiative. He authored the first Swahili dictionary and an original occult-scientific treatise, drawing insights from extensive fieldwork across the Swahili world and the Arabian Peninsula. His research gleaned knowledge from a diverse range of oral and textual sources, including both enslaved and free interlocutors.
This Omani intellectual’s contributions marked a pivotal moment in Arabian knowledge of East Africa. In his methodological intervention, Nāṣir seamlessly united the nature and culture of East Africa. By integrating indigenous knowledge—both cultural and environmental—his approach aimed to make East Africa legible and accessible to the expanding Omani Empire and his Arabic readers across the Western Indian Ocean. In this presentation, I will delve into Nāṣir’s writings and their intellectual context to illustrate how his methodological intervention not only broke new ground in approaching Swahili as a language to learn and a language of learning, but also fundamentally contributed to the documentation of East Africa by integrating its indigenous cosmic and cultural knowledge into the expanding Omani Empire’s intellectual landscape in Arabia and East Africa.
