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Three Questions for Historians of Science in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

Cyrus Schayegh
Cyrus Schayegh*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

What was science, who was involved in it, and where did it unfold in the modern Middle East and North Africa? These are the three questions raised in this piece. The following notes echo my past research on the growth and societal relevance of biomedical sciences in Iran, and are also informed by a new interest in social sciences and, more particularly, in the establishment in 1927 of the Social Science Research Section at the American University of Beirut (AUB; called Syrian Protestant College until 1920) and its subsequent work. A handful of social scientists led by the American Stuart Dodd and financed by the US Rockefeller Foundation, which was active worldwide, helped turn AUB into a hub not only of education, but more than before, of research too. Covering wide swathes of the “Near East,” these social scientists framed that region as an extraordinary “laboratory” for social science research.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 588 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Dodd, Stuartet al., “A Center for Cultural Anthropology in the Middle East: A Draft Project for Discussion between the Smithsonian Institution and the American University of Beirut,” p. 6, in Department of Sociology and Psychology Yearbook 18 (1945–46): 361Google Scholar, in Archives and Special Collections, American University of Beirut (hereafter ASC/AUB). See also Dodd, Stuart, “The Syrian Near East as a Center for Social Science Research,” News Bulletin of the Institute of International Education 10, no. 8 (1935): 4–6Google Scholar.

2 For a recent overview of research on medicine and public health, see Gallagher, Nancy, “Review Article: Medicine and Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012): 799–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a direct treatment of the question of how the history of medicine can inform more general histories, see, for example, Davidovitch, Nadav and Zalashik, Rakefet, “The Social History of Medicine and Israeli History: A Potential Dialogue,” Journal of Israeli History 30 (2011): 83–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Zalashik, Rakefet, ʿAd Nefesh: Mehagrim, ʿOlim, Plitim ve-ha-Mimsad ha-Psikhiatri be-Yisraʾel (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibuts ha-Meʾuhad, 2008 [German, 2012])Google Scholar. A classic is Fahmy, Khaled, “Medicine and Power: Towards a Social History of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in New Frontiers in the Social History of the Middle East, ed. Hill, Enid (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2001), 15–62Google Scholar. For Iran, see Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Regarding the influence and confluence of various biomedical and social sciences, see Shakry, Omnia El, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Iran and France, see one of the leading sociological practitioners in late Pahlavi Iran, Naraghi, Ehsan, Jamiʿah, Javanan, Danishgah, Diruz, Farda. Nivishtihah-i Ihsan Naragi (Tehran: Kitabha-yi Jibi, 1977)Google Scholar; and Naraghi, , From Palace to Prison: Inside the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Azadarmaki, Taqi, Jamiʿah-Shinasi-yi Jamiʿah-Shinasi dar Iran (Tehran: Nashr-i Kalamah, 1999)Google Scholar.

4 For details, see Schayegh, Cyrus, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar. For related works, see Elshakry, Marwa, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Amster, Ellen, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

5 See Longuenesse, Elisabeth, ed., Santé, médecine et société dans le monde arabe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 85–102, 219–44, 245–60Google Scholar; Anastassiadou-Dumont, Méropi, ed., Médecins et ingénieurs ottomans à l’âge des nationalismes (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003)Google Scholar. On the modern middle classes, see Watenpaugh, Keith, Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For global contexts, see Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 744–50, 761–78, 779–825Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Ebrahimnejad, Hormoz, Medicine, Public Health, and the Qajar State (Leiden: Brill, 2004)Google Scholar; and Baysan, Vehbi, “Restructuring Ottoman State and Society: Bureaucratic Views of Science and Technology during the Reform Period,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 55 (2005): 467–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 All quotes are from Zurayq, Qustantin, Maʿna al-Nakba (Beirut: Dar al-ʿIlm li-l-Malayin, 1948), 45, 50, 51Google Scholar. See also Zurayq, , Maʿna al-Nakba Mujaddadan (Beirut: Dar al-ʿIlm li-l-Malayin, 1967)Google Scholar.

8 Edgar Melgar, a graduate student at Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department, is writing his dissertation on this topic. For India, see Arnold, David, Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Prakash, Gyan, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Dodd, Stuart, “Suggested Topics for the Social Science Section of the Near Eastern Colleges Conference,” in Department of Sociology and Psychology Yearbook 5 (1932–33): 195–97Google Scholar, in ASC/AUB.

10 See, for example, the correspondence between Alfred Bonné (the head of the Jerusalem-based Economic Research Institute), Dodd, and AUB economics professor George Hakim, boxes A473/1 and A473/7, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. Also, when Dodd edited a monumental bibliography of the Mandates, as a matter of course he included a Hebrew fascicle and asked a Hebrew University librarian, A. Yaari, to edit it. See Yaari, A., “Hebrew Fascicle,” in Post-War Bibliography, ed. Dodd, Stuart (Beirut: AUB Press, 1932)Google Scholar.

11 Elshakry, Reading Darwin.