Justin Stearns | New York University Abu Dhabi (original) (raw)
Books by Justin Stearns
Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural scien... more Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Justin K. Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world. Challenging these depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world, Stearns uses numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences to a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in scholarly and educational landscapes of the Early Modern Magreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Early Modern Morocco.
Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of... more Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of his generation. In 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four, and after a long and distinguished career, this Amazigh scholar from the Middle Atlas began writing a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects. Completed three years later and gathered together under the title Discourses on Language and Literature (al-Muhadarat fi l-adab wa-l-lughah), they offer rich insight into the varied intellectual interests of an ambitious and gifted Moroccan scholar, covering subjects as diverse as genealogy, theology, Sufism, history, and social mores.
In addition to representing the author’s intellectual interests, The Discourses also includes numerous autobiographical anecdotes, which offer valuable insight into the history of Morocco, including the transition from the Saadian to the Alaouite dynasty, which occurred during al-Yusi’s lifetime. Translated into English for the first time, The Discourses offers readers access to the intellectual landscape of the early modern Muslim world through an author who speaks openly and frankly about his personal life and his relationships with his country’s rulers, scholars, and commoners.
"Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the tr... more "Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world.
How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy.
Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities.
Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.
Justin K. Stearns is an assistant professor in the Arab Crossroads Studies Program at New York University–Abu Dhabi."
Papers by Justin Stearns
History of Science, 2023
This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars wh... more This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 2021
Contextualization and analysis of an unpublished seventeenth century Moroccan treatise of sorcery... more Contextualization and analysis of an unpublished seventeenth century Moroccan treatise of sorcery by al-Mirghiti al-Susi that has an intriguing manuscript history
Exemplaria, 2021
Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades ... more Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades in premodern studies and challenged it to go further. Particularly in light of the United States' continuing military interventions in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and East Africa, its domestic surveillance apparatus, and its associated Islamophobic rhetoric, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) remains a central text with which to approach such a decolonizing mission. Or does it? This conversation considers how Orientalism, and Orientalism, have influenced the current structures of knowledge production about the "East" in both European and Near Eastern premodern studies, asking whether Said's critique is still relevant to contemporary discussions. Kaya Şahin (an early modern Ottoman historian), Julia Schleck (an early modern English literary critic), and Justin Stearns (a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic Middle East) met at a 2010 NEH Summer Seminar designed to bring together in conversation European and Middle Eastern historians, art historians, and literary critics. They continue that conversation here by reflecting on how premodern scholars might continue to build on Said's work in ways that recognize the limitations of the original work and productively adapt its insights to earlier texts and histories.
Bloomsbury Cultural History of Medicine, 2021
I IN THIS ESSAY, I use sovereignty as a lens to examine a particular facet of the history of epid... more I IN THIS ESSAY, I use sovereignty as a lens to examine a particular facet of the history of epidemic disease in the premodern Muslim Mediterranean. In placing the subjects of sovereignty and scholarly responses to epidemic disease into conversation with each other, I offer a few observations regarding the history of public health in the premodern Muslim world that, while speculative, are hopefully productive.
In recent years, the subject of science in the Muslim World in the pre-modern period has largely ... more In recent years, the subject of science in the Muslim World in the pre-modern period has largely been discussed in the context of two master narratives: (1) how and to what extent did Muslim scholarship influence European intellectual history, and (2) the nature of the decline of science and intellectual life in general in the Muslim world during the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. This essay moves beyond these two narratives by first summarizing the history of European studies of science in the Muslim world. It then draws upon recent developments in Europeanist history of science and outstanding work by historians of Islamicate science to stress the importance of avoiding Whiggish readings of the history of the natural sciences in the Muslim world as well as the necessity for situating the same sciences in relation to developments in theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and mysticism.
In a range of recent popular and scholarly surveys of the history and significance of al-Andalus,... more In a range of recent popular and scholarly surveys of the history and significance of al-Andalus, US scholars have emphasized that Muslim Iberia was characterized by attributes such as “tolerance,” and “cosmopolitanism.” This article aims to draw attention to the neglected work of a contemporary Austrian historian and philosopher, Gottfried Liedl, who in his Frontier trilogy has argued for the modernity of Narid Granada from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Through a reading of Liedl's discussion of how Granada was legally, militarily, socially, and demographically both modern and European, this article argues for the importance of Liedl's work to understanding the full spectrum of the ways in which scholars use aspects of the history of al-Andalus to advance master narratives for the significance of Islamic Iberia. Throughout his work, Liedl presents a critique of both “modernity” and the state in its modern form by arguing that Narid Granada was the first modern European state.
Islamic Law and Society, Jan 1, 2007
Medieval Encounters, 15, Jan 1, 2009
History Compass, Jan 1, 2009
Book Reviews by Justin Stearns
Review of "Gottfried Liedl, Granada: Ein europäisches Emirat an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit." (Die L... more Review of "Gottfried Liedl, Granada: Ein europäisches Emirat an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit." (Die
Levante—frühe Ansätze der Globalisierung Vom 5. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit 3; Islamische
Renaissancen 2.) Berlin: LIT, 2020.
Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural scien... more Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Justin K. Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world. Challenging these depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world, Stearns uses numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences to a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in scholarly and educational landscapes of the Early Modern Magreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Early Modern Morocco.
Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of... more Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of his generation. In 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four, and after a long and distinguished career, this Amazigh scholar from the Middle Atlas began writing a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects. Completed three years later and gathered together under the title Discourses on Language and Literature (al-Muhadarat fi l-adab wa-l-lughah), they offer rich insight into the varied intellectual interests of an ambitious and gifted Moroccan scholar, covering subjects as diverse as genealogy, theology, Sufism, history, and social mores.
In addition to representing the author’s intellectual interests, The Discourses also includes numerous autobiographical anecdotes, which offer valuable insight into the history of Morocco, including the transition from the Saadian to the Alaouite dynasty, which occurred during al-Yusi’s lifetime. Translated into English for the first time, The Discourses offers readers access to the intellectual landscape of the early modern Muslim world through an author who speaks openly and frankly about his personal life and his relationships with his country’s rulers, scholars, and commoners.
"Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the tr... more "Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world.
How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy.
Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities.
Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.
Justin K. Stearns is an assistant professor in the Arab Crossroads Studies Program at New York University–Abu Dhabi."
History of Science, 2023
This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars wh... more This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 2021
Contextualization and analysis of an unpublished seventeenth century Moroccan treatise of sorcery... more Contextualization and analysis of an unpublished seventeenth century Moroccan treatise of sorcery by al-Mirghiti al-Susi that has an intriguing manuscript history
Exemplaria, 2021
Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades ... more Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades in premodern studies and challenged it to go further. Particularly in light of the United States' continuing military interventions in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and East Africa, its domestic surveillance apparatus, and its associated Islamophobic rhetoric, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) remains a central text with which to approach such a decolonizing mission. Or does it? This conversation considers how Orientalism, and Orientalism, have influenced the current structures of knowledge production about the "East" in both European and Near Eastern premodern studies, asking whether Said's critique is still relevant to contemporary discussions. Kaya Şahin (an early modern Ottoman historian), Julia Schleck (an early modern English literary critic), and Justin Stearns (a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic Middle East) met at a 2010 NEH Summer Seminar designed to bring together in conversation European and Middle Eastern historians, art historians, and literary critics. They continue that conversation here by reflecting on how premodern scholars might continue to build on Said's work in ways that recognize the limitations of the original work and productively adapt its insights to earlier texts and histories.
Bloomsbury Cultural History of Medicine, 2021
I IN THIS ESSAY, I use sovereignty as a lens to examine a particular facet of the history of epid... more I IN THIS ESSAY, I use sovereignty as a lens to examine a particular facet of the history of epidemic disease in the premodern Muslim Mediterranean. In placing the subjects of sovereignty and scholarly responses to epidemic disease into conversation with each other, I offer a few observations regarding the history of public health in the premodern Muslim world that, while speculative, are hopefully productive.
In recent years, the subject of science in the Muslim World in the pre-modern period has largely ... more In recent years, the subject of science in the Muslim World in the pre-modern period has largely been discussed in the context of two master narratives: (1) how and to what extent did Muslim scholarship influence European intellectual history, and (2) the nature of the decline of science and intellectual life in general in the Muslim world during the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. This essay moves beyond these two narratives by first summarizing the history of European studies of science in the Muslim world. It then draws upon recent developments in Europeanist history of science and outstanding work by historians of Islamicate science to stress the importance of avoiding Whiggish readings of the history of the natural sciences in the Muslim world as well as the necessity for situating the same sciences in relation to developments in theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and mysticism.
In a range of recent popular and scholarly surveys of the history and significance of al-Andalus,... more In a range of recent popular and scholarly surveys of the history and significance of al-Andalus, US scholars have emphasized that Muslim Iberia was characterized by attributes such as “tolerance,” and “cosmopolitanism.” This article aims to draw attention to the neglected work of a contemporary Austrian historian and philosopher, Gottfried Liedl, who in his Frontier trilogy has argued for the modernity of Narid Granada from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Through a reading of Liedl's discussion of how Granada was legally, militarily, socially, and demographically both modern and European, this article argues for the importance of Liedl's work to understanding the full spectrum of the ways in which scholars use aspects of the history of al-Andalus to advance master narratives for the significance of Islamic Iberia. Throughout his work, Liedl presents a critique of both “modernity” and the state in its modern form by arguing that Narid Granada was the first modern European state.
Islamic Law and Society, Jan 1, 2007
Medieval Encounters, 15, Jan 1, 2009
History Compass, Jan 1, 2009
Review of "Gottfried Liedl, Granada: Ein europäisches Emirat an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit." (Die L... more Review of "Gottfried Liedl, Granada: Ein europäisches Emirat an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit." (Die
Levante—frühe Ansätze der Globalisierung Vom 5. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit 3; Islamische
Renaissancen 2.) Berlin: LIT, 2020.
Middle East Journal, 2019
Review of Syrinx van Hees, Inhitat: The Decline Paradigm
Review of Cadíes y cadiazgo en al-Andalus y en el Magreb Medieval, edited by Rachid El Hour and R... more Review of Cadíes y cadiazgo en al-Andalus y en el Magreb Medieval, edited by Rachid El Hour and Rafael Mayor, 2012 . Appeared in Islamic Law and Society 25 (2018), 314-17.
Few questions have inspired historians studying the interactions between the pre-modern Muslim wo... more Few questions have inspired historians studying the interactions between the pre-modern Muslim world and Europe with quite as much passion as that of translation and its influence. Marc Bloch warned us that historians all too readily revert to worshipping at the idol of origins when it comes to assigning significance to religious or political institutions instead of parsing why each generation chooses to continue believing what it does—in Bloch's opinion we would do better to heed " the old Arab proverb…'Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.' " 1 We should be similarly wary of limiting our study of the translation movements that linked Christendom and Islamdom in the Middle Ages to the moments of transmission themselves, understandable though such a focus might be. The elite and state sponsored translation of largely but not only Greek works by largely but not only Christian scholars employed by Muslim patrons into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries in Baghdad was the first of these moments. The second was the translation of Arabic texts into Latin by Christian and Jewish scholars with often uncredited Muslim assistance in Iberia and southern Italy from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The story that Dag Nikolaus Hasse tells in Success and Suppression is of a third and less discussed translation movement in Europe that took place between 1400 and 1650 and which involved the retranslation of works previously translated in the Middle Ages along previously untranslated works, some of them translated into Latin from Hebrew translations of Arabic texts. This third movement was closely related to Humanism, the productive as well as violent philological return to Greek and Latin sources that characterized much of the Renaissance's cultural impetus, but which, as characterized by previous scholarship, set Humanists against Arabists in early modern Europe in an argument over the status and reliability of Arabic scholarship. In providing us with the most comprehensive depiction yet of Renaissance translations of Arabic scholarship, Hasse nuances the narrative of Humanist vs. Arabist opposition, and draws a complicated picture of the myriad ways in which Arabic scholarship lived on after translation in fifteenth to seventeenth century Europe. In doing so, he gives a quantitative overview of the number and location of printed editions of Latin translations and then focuses on their subsequent significance, especially in the fields of medicine, philosophy, and astrology, in all of which Arabic scholarship proved to be controversial (xv). The second part of the book is composed of a lengthy (ninety pages) appendix giving biographical sketches
Review of Khaled El-Rouayheb's Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly... more Review of Khaled El-Rouayheb's Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and
the Maghreb.
Review of the Slavery Museum in Doha
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jan 1, 2009
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jan 1, 2008
Entry in the Encyclopedia of Islam for the Plague of 'Amwas
Call for submissions to a new undergraduate journal of Middle East Studies
What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for... more What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.
The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.
Time: Class Meets from 12pm-3pm daily from May 23-June 9. Course Description What does disease me... more Time: Class Meets from 12pm-3pm daily from May 23-June 9. Course Description What does disease mean, and how should we respond to it? This course will examine this question by focusing on how Muslims and Christians in Iberia dealt with pandemic disease during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. It will draw on religious studies, history, ethics and medicine to contextualize Muslim and Christian communities' varied responses to the challenge of contagious disease. Abrahamic communities shared a medical heritage and an ethical imperative to care for the sick while also possessing their own unique religious traditions when it came to defining the significance of pandemic disease. The class will read plague treatises, studies of the social, economic, and political effects of plague, as well as considering the history of public health in the premodern world. The course will include trips to Toledo and Granada.
Syllabus for a survey course of Middle East History 600-1800
This seminar aims to, on the one hand, introduce students to the main theoretical and epistemolog... more This seminar aims to, on the one hand, introduce students to the main theoretical and epistemological trends in the study of the Arab Crossroads region, and on the other, to offer practical examples of the types of methodologies used by scholars working in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. The course begins with a critical engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of area studies, and the politics of producing knowledge on a region that is of such global economic and political importance. It then turns to specific areas of research that have attracted considerable attention in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and politics, before exploring the various methodological approaches used by practitioners of these fields. The course assignments include response papers, short essays on specific debates in relevant scholarship, and culminates in an extended research proposal for a capstone project.
This is the final version of the syllabus for the course the second time that Erin Pettigrew and ... more This is the final version of the syllabus for the course the second time that Erin Pettigrew and I taught it (Fall 2021).
This is a draft syllabus for a intensive short course I have been approved to teach in January 20... more This is a draft syllabus for a intensive short course I have been approved to teach in January 2022 on the history of pandemics in the Muslim world, and which includes a brief trip to Dubrovnik (Croatia) to see the lazaretti there. I would be grateful for any feedback/suggestions.
This is a draft syllabus for a course that Erin Pettigrew and I will be teaching this coming fall... more This is a draft syllabus for a course that Erin Pettigrew and I will be teaching this coming fall. Any suggestions/thoughts/criticisms welcome!
Description: This seminar aims to, on the one hand, introduce students to the main theoretical an... more Description: This seminar aims to, on the one hand, introduce students to the main theoretical and epistemological trends in the study of the Arab Crossroads region, and on the other, to offer practical examples of the types of methodologies used by scholars working in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. The course begins with a critical engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of area studies, and the politics of producing knowledge on a region that is of such global economic and political importance. It then turns to specific areas of research that have attracted considerable attention in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and politics, before exploring the various methodological approaches used by practitioners of these fields. The course assignments include response papers, short essays on specific debates in relevant scholarship, transcribed interviews, and culminate in an extended research proposal for a capstone project.
Treating the Body in a Sufi lodge in Seventeenth Century Morocco In the late seventeenth-centu... more Treating the Body in a Sufi lodge in Seventeenth Century Morocco
In the late seventeenth-century, the head of the Salihi Sufi lodge in Tamgrut, Abū al-‘Abbās Sīdī Aḥmad al-Dara‘ī (d. 1144/1731) wrote a long poem of over a thousand lines on medicine that went on to enjoy great popularity in Morocco. The Worthy Gift of Medicine (al-Hadīya al-maqbūla fī l-ṭibb) drew on the Arab-Galenic tradition as well as Prophetic medicine, and in the fashion of the time, al-Dara‘ī wrote a long commentary to fully explain it. This paper will use al-Dara‘ī’s works to explore the nature and status of medicine in seventeenth century Morocco and its relationship with the religious sciences of the period. It argues for Morocco’s vibrant intellectual life being deeply integrated into religious networks of study and transmission that were inextricably linked to the branches of the Shadhili Sufi order that were dominant in Morocco.
Scholars of the natural sciences in Early Modern Europe have long been attentively critical of the teleological retro-projection of the science/religion binary into the pre-modern period and have carefully described the ways in which medical and religious discourses were at times mutually constitutive. Precisely because of the narratives of Middle Eastern decline that achieved dominance in both Europe and the Middle East in the nineteenth century, research into the history of the natural sciences (including medicine) there has been largely directed towards the so-called Golden Age of Islamic science that subsequently influenced European thought through a series of translation movements. This paper argues that a renewed focus on the complexities of the productive relationship between medicine and religious discourses in Early Modern Morocco will not only deepen our understanding of the period’s intellectual landscape but helps revise of overall understanding of the intellectual history of the pre-modern Middle East.
Part Two: Diversity and Change
![Research paper thumbnail of Post on IslamicLaw Blog: Against "flattening the [curve of] diversity of approaches" to Muslim understandings of contagion in a time of pandemic :: Part One](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/63132554/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Part One: : Sources and Approaches. The global spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 during the firs... more Part One: : Sources and Approaches. The global spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 during the first months of 2020 exposed Muslims to a contagious pandemic on a scale unknown in living memory, prompting unprecedented public health measures in Muslim majority countries, and leading many Muslims to reflect on the ways in which past Muslim communities had responded to infectious disease. The temptation for academics scrambling to contextualize current responses to this pandemic, as for many modern-day Muslim scholars drawing on selected Prophetic traditions Against "flattening the [curve of] diversity of approaches" to Mu.
a Sufi intellectual in seventeenth-century Morocco? While that wasn't what al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī set o... more a Sufi intellectual in seventeenth-century Morocco? While that wasn't what al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī set out to tell us in The Discourses (https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/books /9780814764572/the-discourses/), composed in the 1680s CE, the book nonetheless gives us a picture of his life and time. Here, the second part of a discussion with al-Yūsī's English-language translator, Justin Stearns: By M Lynx Qualey (https://arablit.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/justin250x375.png) (https://arablit.files.wordpress.com/2020/04 /discourses250x375.jpg)The peripatetic al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī was in his fifties, and arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual of his generation, when he found himself sent by Moulay Ismāʿīl to live near the ruins of the DilāʾSufi lodge. It was in this moment, when he was under quasi-house-arrest by Morocco's second Alawite ruler, that the scholar set down The Discourses, the first volume of which has now been edited and translated to English as a "labor of love" by Justin Stearns, Associate Professor in Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. Although al-Yūsī is remembered foremost as a logician and a saint, The Discourses presents other sides to the seventeenth-century Sufi intellectual, offering up his culinary and digestive opinions, his thoughts on composing poetry, a number of amusing anecdotes, and tips for parents who are dealing with late walkers. This wide-ranging, digressive seventeenth-century account is largely inward-looking; it's almost entirely uninterested in Europe or in al-Yūsī's contemporaries in Cairo or Baghdad. And yet it also fluidly weaves history from the seventh through tenth centuries of the Arab East with the Morocco of his times. REPORT THIS ADREPORT THIS AD In this second of a two-part discussion, supported by the Library of Arabic Literature (http://libraryofarabicliterature.org), Stearns answers a few questions about his own long journey with al-Yūsī, including his sometimes-contradictory takes on the topics of genealogy and women, belonging to the Amazigh community, the trustworthiness of saints, and…lice collars. The Discourses starts out with a long and seemingly contradictory section on genealogy. What are we Saints, Goats, and Genealogy: The First Volume of al-Yūsī's Di... https://arablit.org/2020/04/23/saints-goats-and-genealogy-the-fir... 1 of 11 4/23/20, 7:03 AM
Interview on The Discourses
First Part of an Interview on my translation of al-Yusi's Discourses.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022
The past we imagine is always partly, sometimes wholly, filled with ourselves." 1 When we go look... more The past we imagine is always partly, sometimes wholly, filled with ourselves." 1 When we go looking for the present in the past we always find it, a reflection of our own desire that speaks to the time and place we began our search. This problem is well known to historians of premodern science, the term itself in its singular representing a stumbling block to understanding how scholars, practitioners, and their societies classified and pursued knowledge of the natural world. In order to avoid the teleology of shearing all knowledge and practice from whatever does not lead to the science of the twentieth century, such historians turn science into natural philosophy or employ it in the plural, sciences, as discrete bodies of knowledge lacking a unifying method, some mathematical, some drawing on empirical observation, some rooted in the occult. 2 This attention to terminology plays a small if initial role in how these historians hope to describe past attempts to understand and intervene in the natural world. Without such attention to the words we use, they argue, we risk misreading the past out of a desire to find there our present moment and our present understandings. To be sure, there are continuities across time, but these must be held in balance with the contingencies of past contexts. With race, we face a similar challenge with another term that gained its current significance in the nineteenth century, but which can plausibly be translated from concepts found in languages around the Mediterranean from antiquity until the present
Early Science and Medicine, 2021
In the late seventeenth century, the head of the Salihiyya Sufi lodge in the far south of Morocco... more In the late seventeenth century, the head of the Salihiyya Sufi lodge in the far south of Morocco, Abu al-ʿAbbas Sidi Ahmad al-Salihi al-Dar'i (d. 1144/1731), wrote a poem of over a thousand lines on medicine, a long composition that went on to enjoy great popularity. The Worthy Gift of Medicine (al-Hadiya al-maqbula fi l-tibb) drew on a wide range of sources, including the Arab-Galenic tradition and Prophetic medicine, and in the fashion of the time, al-Salihi wrote a long commentary to fully explain it. Al-Salihi's medical writings thus provide a productive entry point into the nature of medical writing and practice in early modern Morocco, as well as the historiographical narratives that have structured the ways in which they have been studied.
Exemplaria, 2021
Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades ... more Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades in premodern studies and challenged it to go further. Particularly in light of the United States’ continuing military interventions in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and East Africa, its domestic surveillance apparatus, and its associated Islamophobic rhetoric, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) remains a central text with which to approach such a decolonizing mission. Or does it? This conversation considers how Orientalism, and Orientalism, have influenced the current structures of knowledge production about the “East” in both European and Near Eastern premodern studies, asking whether Said’s critique is still relevant to contemporary discussions.
Kaya Şahin (an early modern Ottoman historian), Julia Schleck (an early modern English literary critic), and Justin Stearns (a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic Middle East) met at a 2010 NEH Summer Seminar designed to bring together in conversation European and Middle Eastern historians, art historians, and literary critics. They continue that conversation here by reflecting on how premodern scholars might continue to build on Said’s work in ways that recognize the limitations of the original work and productively adapt its insights to earlier texts and histories.
al-Shariqa al-Thaqafiyya, 2021
Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades ... more Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades in premodern studies and challenged it to go further. Particularly in light of the United States' continuing military interventions in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and East Africa, its domestic surveillance apparatus, and its associated Islamophobic rhetoric, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) remains a central text with which to approach such a decolonizing mission. Or does it? This conversation considers how Orientalism, and Orientalism, have influenced the current structures of knowledge production about the "East" in both European and Near Eastern premodern studies, asking whether Said's critique is still relevant to contemporary discussions. Kaya Şahin (an early modern Ottoman historian), Julia Schleck (an early modern English literary critic), and Justin Stearns (a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic Middle East) met at a 2010 NEH Summer Seminar designed to bring together in conversation European and Middle Eastern historians, art historians, and literary critics. They continue that conversation here by reflecting on how premodern scholars might continue to build on Said's work in ways that recognize the limitations of the original work and productively adapt its insights to earlier texts and histories.
This lecture series is an open, public component of the spring 2021 course, “Pandemic Literatures... more This lecture series is an open, public component of the spring 2021 course, “Pandemic Literatures,” SPAN-UA 461/MEIS-UA 518/COLIT-UA 852-2, which is open to NYU & consortium undergrad and grad students. The syllabus is available here: https://tinyurl.com/spanishflusyllabus. Register at this link for the series: https://tinyurl.com/spanishflulectures or scan the QR code on the poster.