Provides a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in the scholarly and educational landscape of Early Modern Morocco, this study challenges previous negative depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world to demonstrate the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society in seventeenth-century Morocco.

Justin K. Stearns is Associate Professor of Arab Crossroad Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. He is the author of Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean and al-Yusi: The Discourses (2011).

Preface: paths not taken; Introduction: Narratives of science, old and new; 1. A landscape of learning in the far west; Excursus: the poverty of intellectual history as a series of great men; 2. Constructing science in Morocco between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; Excursus: the horizons of causality: how to think about causes, nature, and ghosts of scientific methods; 3. Legalizing science: the authority of the natural sciences in Islamic law; Excursus: Kuhn and the history of science in Islamicate societies; 4. Writing the mathematical and natural sciences; Excursus: Sufism and the spiritual life: balancing the exoteric and esoteric sciences; Conclusion.