“Science, Occupation, and Secularization: Transformations in Ottoman Egyptian Pedagogy, 1205–1240 AH/1791–1830 CE”

Edna Bonhomme (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

During the late eighteenth century, Egypt went through a set of political and economic ruptures that reconfigured power amongst the local and foreign rulers. This paper considers a series of intellectual and pedagogical transformations in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Egypt that was connected to the patronage system, the quantity of books published, and the transfiguration of science. Ḥasan al-ʻAṭṭār and ʻAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī were two Egyptian scholars who helped to reformulate Ottoman Egyptian scholarship during the French military occupation and the modernization projects under Muḥammad ʿAlī. Eighteenth-century scholars such as Ḥasan al-ʻAṭṭār were captivated by European science and becoming more secular while al-Jabartī was more skeptical of European’s presence in Egypt. I argue that a) the major political shifts in Egypt opened up space for ʿulamāʾ and especially Ḥasan al-ʻAṭṭār who consolidated a syncretic intellectual tradition (in natural science and medicine but also across a range of other fields), b) that this new tradition was neither a revival of Islamic knowledge nor an imported European knowledge but was constituted of syncretic forms, and c) that this was the context for the much-remarked upon emergence of the Arab renaissance. This was possible because there was a qualitative shift in scientific thought in Ottoman Egypt during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries within the Egyptian state. This paper will highlight some of his key texts with the aim of closely examining the vacillating balances of knowledge and power.

“Out of Many, One: Idea of Unity of A Science in the Ottoman Empire”

Kenan Tekin (Yalova University)

After the translation of Greek philosophical corpus into Arabic, Muslim scholars reshuffled various issues including the discussion of the idea of science, which used to be discussed in the book of demonstration in the Organon of Aristotle, and also partly in the Metaphysics. Post-classical Muslim scholars put a great deal of thought into what makes a particular discipline a science. This is evident from the fact that they placed such discussions right at the beginning of scholarly works, i.e. the introduction (muqaddima) of scientific books. Hence, a scientific discipline be it religious or rational, was introduced by the aspect of unity that was crucial for defining the science. In fact, this practice became quite well established that by the fourteenth century previous works which did not include this information were normalized through insertions in commentaries. For instance, Athir al-Din al-Abhari’s Isagoge, one of the most famous and popular summas of logic, lacked that information. Therefore, in his commentary on this summa, the Ottoman scholar Molla Fenari remedied this situation by not only presenting the subject matter, purpose and utility of logic, but also by providing an argument for doing so. Fenari’s brief discussion on the need for introducing students to a science by its aspect of unity, be it essential or accidental, became a subject of commentaries and glosses in the following centuries. Based on this overview, the paper argues, unlike the modern concerns with methods, post-classical Muslims propagated a metaphysical notion of science.

“Problematizing the Beginning of Ottoman Science Studies: Historiography in Turkey’s Early Republican Period”

Hasan Umut (McGill University)

One of the earliest and most important works on the Ottoman experience of science was published by Adnan Adıvar in 1939 under the name La Science chez les Turks, whose enlarged version appeared a few years later in Turkish as Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim [Science among the Ottoman Turks]. Though it points out a number of significant scientific and intellectual topics in Ottoman history, and is still useful for the field, its approach is largely Eurocentric. Accordingly, since the Ottomans allegedly could not keep up with the newly emerging modern science, their science was afflicted with stagnation, and eventually with decline. Moreover, he describes Ottoman science as “the deficient and sometimes incorrect continuation of science in Arabic and Persian languages.” In this paper, considering the fact that Adıvar has been influential, to varying degrees up until now, on directions of the literature that has been produced after him, I will problematize his narrative of science among the Ottomans, discussing some of the basic assumptions upon which his work relies. I will argue that Adıvar’s approach that centralizes the European experience of science, by which he marginalizes and even orientalizes the Ottoman experience, can be better understood by paying close attention to the political and intellectual challenges he faced in his checkered life, which witnessed the political transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey.