Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco by Justin K. Stearns

In this book, Stearns’ goal is to highlight the sustained engagement with natural sciences in Morocco during the long seventeenth century to counter directly claims about “stasis” or “decline” that still dominate discourses in Western and Middle Eastern societies, inside and outside academia. Stearns does so not by showcasing individual notable achievements but rather by highlighting the mundane, regular engagement and cultivation of the sciences in early modern Moroccan institutions and society (both rural and urban). He examines biographies, classifications of sciences, manuscripts-as-objects, institutional collections and histories, legal opinions, and other religious and literary works, along with a few scientific works from seventeenth-century Morocco, a region that has received sparse attention from historians of Islamic science, particularly during the Early Modern Period. This book is best seen as an initial, interdisciplinary foray into a neglected period and region that shows how generating more local histories of science in Islamic societies...