Too good not to share.

One of the hats I wear at NYUAD is serving on a committee on labor issues related to our contracted colleagues. Today was very happy to see the efforts of our Office of Social Responsibility regarding Adult Education recognized by Times Higher Education. Such important work and so deserved!

In Rome for a 2 day conference on Morocco and wandering around the halls of the Sapienza’s equivalent of arts and humanities building I see the following posters for departments, making me think that I’ve been thinking about this far too literally for too long.

Infectious Ideas has since been translated into both Arabic and Russian. I'm very happy with the Arabic translation, for which I wrote a new forward - the first Arabic I have written in years – and believe that Sarah Abd al-Hamid did a wonderful job. I only wish I could read Russian! Fin./

Just got my copy of @rachelschine.bsky.social ‘s Black Knights! Very much enjoyed reading this in proofs and it’s great to see it in the wild!

The fourth, “Sufism and the Spiritual Life or Balancing the Exoteric and Esoteric Sciences,” reviews recent scholarship to remind us of why it wasn’t remarkable at all that it was Sufi institutions in 17th century Morocco that forwarded and supported the study of the natural sciences. 6/

The third, “Kuhn and the History of Science in Islamicate Societies,” draws on the famous image of Kuhn of science developing like a tree instead of a linear fashion to argue for a different way of looking at developments in the natural sciences in the post-formative Muslim world. 5/

The second, “The Horizons of Causality or How to Think about Causes, Nature, and Ghosts of Scientific Methods,” looks at the theological doctrine of occasionalism and why the absence of a theory of natural law didn’t impede close contemplation of God’s Habit in Creation. 4/

The first, “The Poverty of Intellectual History as a Series of Great Men,” lays out the unmarkable but still neglected case for an intellectual history not of remarkable individuals, but of systems and institutions of education. This has been a desideratum when it comes to the natural sciences. 3/

Finally, in the conclusion al-Yusi argues against nostalgia for the scholars of the past and stresses how each generation should be content with its place and time. A refutation of the trope of fasad al-zaman - supports al-Yusi’s view of the importance and efficacy of studying God’s creation. /Fin.

Chapter 4 — readings of astronomical, medical, and alchemical texts — opens with a passage in which al-Yusi ponders the splendor of God’s Habit in organizing the world and how one acquires sciences through its study and pairs this with al-Mirghiti describing learning the secrets of alchemy. 7/

Chapter 3 — an examination of the natural sciences through legal sources — kicks off with a long quote from the 20th century Moroccan scholar al-Wazzani of al-Yusi’s views on the licit nature of astronomical devices to determine ritual matters and pairs this with Yusi’s view of smoking tobacco.6/

Chapter 2 begins with one of my favorite anecdotes from The Discourses — al-Maqqari in Egypt displaying his photographic memory. Al-Yusi uses this to draw parallels with al-Amidi and Ibn Tumart — two figures who suffered s due to the envy and ignorance of their contemporaries. 4/

Chapter 1 — an overview of the institutional landscape of learning in largely rural Morocco — begins with pairing Nasiri description of the Dila’ lodge where al-Yusi spent much of his scholarly life with al-Yusi’s account of studying a grammatical text in the Sus, south of the Atlas. 3/