In Morocco during the seventeenth century a significant minority of Muslim scholars studied and wrote works on the natural sciences. How do we go about telling their stories? This paper lays out the historiographical challenges of narrating the history of the natural sciences in the Muslim world during a period widely considered to have been one of intellectual decline, and then turns to a preliminary evaluation of the medical, astronomical, and alchemical works written in Morocco during this period.
The historiographical challenges are many and are related to much of the research on the natural sciences in the Muslim world having been preoccupied with two topics, 1) the translation and appropriation of Greek and Indian sciences by Muslims and those living under their rule in the eighth-tenth centuries, and 2) the influence of Muslim writings on European Christian scholarship between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. What Muslim scholars wrote following the beginning of what is still often glossed as the Scientific Revolution(s) of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries has been neglected. Within the field of Islamic studies, recent work on the intellectual history of the early modern period allows us to contextualize scholarship on the natural sciences during this period.
Using the writings on timekeeping of al-Rudani (d. 1094/1683), on material medica of al-Dara‘i (d. 1148/1734), and on alchemy of al-Marghiti ( 1089/1678), this paper will conclude by situating their work within the educational landscape of Morocco, one that was shaped largely by rural Sufi lodges.
