Americans have long sacralized ordinary objects through memory work that reveals the power of the state, that transforms otherwise familiar, even banal, objects into the ties that bind daily life to regimes…
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Couture and the death of the real: A response to Heavenly Bodies
Time, gender-bending, and the medieval church
Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics 
by
Daniel A. Stolz
On continuity and rupture: A reply to Elshakry and Quadri
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Daniel A. Stolz
By pulling at different threads of the book’s argument, Elshakry and Quadri expose a basic tension between the book’s emphasis on the emergence of new Islamic practices and debates in the early twentieth century, and the book’s insistence on tracing this radical moment to the oft-invisible work of people who did not see themselves as radicals at all. Rather than try to resolve this tension, I will take Elshakry’s and Quadri’s remarks as inspiration to clarify a few of its implications. . . . Quadri’s eloquent commentary underscores the depth of the fissure between the knowledge long cultivated by Muslim scholars (ulama), on the one hand, and the new sciences that were increasingly promoted by the late Ottoman state, on the other. . . . In Elshakry’s thoughtful discussion, however, a contrasting theme comes to the fore. Elshakry acknowledges the many ways in which Egyptian ulama practiced the celestial sciences with premises, purposes, and techniques that differed from their French counterparts. Her focus, nevertheless, draws our attention to facts that suggest commonality and continuity.
Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics
by
Junaid Quadri
Encountering another science
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Junaid Quadri
The Lighthouse and the Observatory’s learned account of nineteenth-century Egyptian astronomy’s imbrications with religion, empire, and the social realities and textual traditions they reside in draws so thoroughly on such a wide range of literatures that any simple characterization of it is bound to be an unjust one. But one way to read the book is by reference to its broad historical arc, its tracing of the complex record of departures and continuities that bring us to the unparalleled dominance of Rida’s conception. Daniel Stolz starts not with Ibn Hanbal, but rather the Egyptian-Ottoman-Islamic tradition of scholarly astronomy that both laid the groundwork for this modern conception and acted as its foil. Intellectual historians have often observed the changing signification of ‘ilm in this period—from a broad encompassing term for knowledge of many sorts to one which was identified primarily with science. . . But the valence of ‘amal also changed—intimately linked to science, but also to national, imperial, and civilizational projects of belonging and conquest. ‘Ilm-as-science, that is, was about mastery of the world, not mastery of the self.
Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics
by
Marwa Elshakry
Rethinking the history of the astral sciences in modern Egypt with The Lighthouse and the Observatory
by
Marwa Elshakry
How the history of science can inform histories of the modern Middle East (and vice versa) is precisely what The Lighthouse and the Observatory invites us to consider. As Stolz argues, we should understand the history of science in the vicegeral state squarely within the field of Ottoman studies. As such, he integrates the political, institutional, and social historical background to the years covered, or roughly from the 1830s to the early 1900s. In the process, the book sheds light on a range of interconnected histories, such as the novel bureaucratization of the Egyptian state and of the Ottoman Empire at large; the rise of European commercial and imperial interests in the region; the Orientalist fascination with the history of science in Islam; and, finally, the rapid disciplinary, institutional, and infrastructural transformations in Ottoman Egypt on the eve of colonialism.