Sonja Brentjes, Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (800-1700) (2018) (original) (raw)

Sonja Brentjes, Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (800-1700), Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. 334 pp. ISBN: 9782503574455. € 45 .

A survey of scientific teaching and learning practices in various Islamicate societies over a full millennium, this daring work has already earned wide acclaim, and for good reason: Sonja Brentjes is the first modern historian to tackle the intersection of science and education in premodern Islam. Given the underdeveloped state of these fields generally, and her own specialization in the mathematical sciences specifically, her approach is necessarily impressionistic and piecemeal, as she frequently acknowledges. Her focus on the Islamicate heartlands is unavoidable by the same reason. Yet the resulting study is also methodologically innovative, particularly with respect to manuscript studies. Her sweeping examination of Islamicate teaching texts and the divergent evolution of disciplinary canons over time and space makes this an ideal teaching text in its own turn for Islamicist historians of science and of education alike.

Brentjes rightly has little patience for the master narrative of Islamic scientific decline, whether asserted to set in from the eleventh century or the sixteenth, and even less for apologetic celebrations of a preceding Islamic golden age of science. She counterposes the simple if oft-ignored fact that we have yet to map the circulation of or even identify the vast majority of texts - especially teaching texts - on the physical, mathematical and metaphysical sciences, so all such verdicts are wildly premature. Even a passing familiarity with the surviving primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and the host of other Islamicate languages must give the lie to the declinist narrative: clearly these disciplines continued to be taught, and sometimes creatively revised, to the modern period. Their precise scope is now nearly impossible to trace, however, given our necessary reliance on easily accessible European, American or Russian manuscript collections in the first place, and modern collections throughout the Islamicate world in the second, most constructed according to overtly colonialist-orientalist or reformist-modernist categories of knowledge positing Islam-as-religion above all else. Unless our historiographical methodologies can account and correct for such obscuring ideological filters, we cannot claim to have reconstructed the Islamicate scientific past.

To counteract such essentializing approaches, she emphasizes rather the daily grind of science education, drawing on but not limited to the works of “scientific greats,” and well as its regionalization throughout the Islamic heartlands over the ten centuries covered. (Despite its title, the book occasionally discusses eighteenth-century developments too.) From South and Central Asia to North Africa, educational patterns, practices and canons diverged and converged

in ways both locally and transregionally determined. East-west and west-east travel fluctuated at times but generally remained constant. At the same time, Brentjes proposes a paradigm shift of her own: the transition from private instruction to madrasa education from the eleventh century onward led to sweeping reorganizations and reconceptualizations of science education, though it did, she argues, remain more individualistic and informal than otherwise. She also notes a boom in the occult sciences (al-'ulūm al-gharība) as part of the natural- and mathematical-scientific curriculum, spurred by the Mongol conquest (and the Black Death, I would add) in particular.

Chapter 1 historically contextualizes the textual terrain the remaining seven chapters populate in rigorous detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the so-called classical period, when the teaching of the sciences was a private, non-institutionalized affair, centered on Arabic translations of core Greek texts. Chapters 3 and 4 chart the rise of madrasa education, which increasingly became the site of scientific study too, the religionist assumptions of modern historians notwithstanding; here the focus is on the production and use of handbooks, commentaries and glosses. This analysis allows the mapping of distinct arabophone and persophone traditions, with the latter placing more emphasis on astronomy and philosophy, and the former preferring horology instead. Chapter 5 moves beyond the madrasa to treat of those disciplines more often taught outside it, especially alchemy, astrology and medicine; their sites of instruction included hospitals and private homes, and travel as an educational imperative was valorized. Chapter 6 turns to specific teaching methods, and is based on the close study of disciplinary manuals and proliferating commentaries and glosses thereon. Most crucially, these methods drove the epochal rise of tahqūq culture - emphasizing independent investigation, personal experience and experimentation and philological correction and revision of errors, its disdain for blind imitation (taqlīd) certifying modern, albeit respectful, disagreement with the ancients - from the twelfth century onward. Chapter 7 surveys an eclectic selection of encyclopedias and classifications of the sciences (sg, taṣnif al-'ulūm) produced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, proposing them not simply as reflective of regional educational approaches but as teaching texts in themselves. On this basis, it is argued that there was not so strict a division between the religious and traditional (naqlī) sciences, on the one hand, and the rational ('aqlī) sciences, on the other, as has usually been assumed in the scholarship to date; such sources likewise testify to considerable classificatory and conceptual variation across periods and regions. Chapter 8 is a close study of manuscript copies of the major handbooks on such representative disciplines as astronomy, mathematics, medicine, logic and philosophy. Finally, the Appendices provide tables of the dynasties, ancient

scholars, Islamicate scholars and rulers invoked, for handy reference by nonspecialists, and likewise the five maps in Chapter 1, which trace the shifting boundaries of the Islamicate world from 900 to 1700 .

To support such unprecedentedly wide-ranging investigations, Brentjes relies on an equally wide range of textual genres (226): manuals, tracts, synopses, epitomes, paraphrases, aide-memoires, commentaries, glosses, superglosses, versifications, notebooks, marginalia and flyleaves. Subject to market pressures not entirely unlike those that weigh on academics today, as she shows, premodern Muslim scholars were often persuaded to produce simplifications of their masterworks for broader educational and promotional purposes; less common now is the alacrity with which their students would versify their works.

While this is a magisterial book in both scope and rigor, its pioneering nature inevitably leaves it open to criticisms by a range of specialists, as Brentjes anticipates and welcomes. I therefore have three quibbles:

First, from a broader history of science perspective, I find perplexing her general disinclination (though see 175) to link tahqiq to such closely related and equally pervasive categories as tajriba, experiential assaying or experimentation, constantly deployed in disciplines from astronomy-astrology and alchemy to medicine and botany, since such a linkage would have made her argument more relevant to Europeanist historiography of the “Scientific Revolution” as a modern construct. To subvert obviously antihistorical grand or triumphalist narratives is one thing; to insist on the foreignness and strangeness (262) of Islamicate science-educational culture, despite evidence of certain larger early modern Western continuities and parallels, is another.

Second, Brentjes signals her discomfort with the occult sciences - ubiquitous in her sources, as she does acknowledge, and often designated as such - by flagging them with scare quotes (often adding the qualifier “so-called” too) in every instance. Most problematically, she reclassifies them as a fourth category epistemologically distinct from the natural, mathematical and religious sciences - a move at sharp odds with her cited sources. Given this faulty premise, her discussion of various occult sciences is rudimentary and often terminologically inappropriate. “Letter science” and “sand divination,” for example, are used exclusively in place of the standard “lettrism” and “geomancy,” and ever-contested “magic” (for sihr) is occasionally used as a default master category, following anti-occultist polemicists, rather than occultist practitioners and teachers. Nor does she acknowledge the strikingly pro-occultist tenor of the majority of the encyclopedias of which she treats. Ibn Khaldūn himself, dogged anti-occultism polemicist, is even transmogrified into a teacher of geomancy (109-110)! To be fair, however, the timing of this book’s production appears to have prevented her from taking advantage of the recent surge in

studies on the Islamicate occult sciences, which should be consulted here as supplement and corrective. Yet the same body of scholarship slots neatly into the science-educational context she reconstructs: many early modern Arabic and Persian manuals of various occult sciences showcase the same impetus to canon-formation, explicitly synthesizing dozens to hundreds of earlier texts each in an unprecedentedly accessible and usable way.

Third, speaking of encyclopedias: despite the millennium-wide scope of her study, and departing from her general methodology, Brentjes here depends exclusively on a handful of tenth to fourteenth-century exemplars, following the tack of previous scholarship on the genre. This narrow focus drives her argument as to the lack of a stable distinction between ‘aqli and naqlī sciences, as well as the decline of comprehensive encyclopedia production after the fourteenth century. Neither would seem to be the case over the longue durée, as I showed in my survey of the Arabo-Persian encyclopedic tradition to the seventeenth century, published in these pages (“Powers of One,” IHIW 5/1 [2017], pp. 127-199). Indeed, early modern encyclopedias of the sciences tend to be significantly more comprehensive than their predecessors. But this extended scope only confirms her basic argument that the classification of various natural, mathematical and metaphysical sciences - including especially the occult sciences - did indeed shift according to encyclopedists’ varying epistemological and sociopolitical commitments, eventually coalescing into distinctive persophone and arabophone spheres, albeit ones retaining many textual and social nodes of connection.

These and other quibbles aside, Brentjes’s sweeping yet filigree study constitutes the most forceful and persuasive argument to date against the stillendemic colonialist-orientalist decline thesis. It will serve as model and inspiration for Islamicist historians of science and education working well beyond the historical Islamicate heartlands, and as indispensable handbook for teaching and learning the sources of premodern Islamicate science education for the next generation or two at least, to inspire many epitomes and glosses (though perhaps not versifications) of its own.

Matthew Melvin-Koushki
University of South Carolina, USA
mmelvink@sc.edu