All Beneficial Knowledge is Revealed”:
 The Rational Sciences in the Maghrib in the age of al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691)
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“all Beneficial Knowledge Is and islamic law Revealed” society 21 (2014) 49-80 49 Islamic Law and Society brill.com/ils “All Beneficial Knowledge is Revealed”: The Rational Sciences in the Maghrib in the age of al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691) Justin Stearns New York University Abu Dhabi [email protected] Abst...

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islamic law society 21 (2014) 49-80 “all Beneficial Knowledge Is and Revealed”

Islamic Law 49 and Society

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“All Beneficial Knowledge is Revealed”: The Rational Sciences in the Maghrib in the age of al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691) Justin Stearns New York University Abu Dhabi [email protected]

Abstract The intellectual history of the Muslim world during the post-formative period is poorly understood compared to the centuries in which the initial development of the principal Islamic intellectual traditions occurred. This article examines the legal status of the natural sciences in the thought of the Moroccan scholar al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691) and his contemporaries, both in terms of the categorization of knowledge and in terms of developments in conceptions of causality in post-formative Ashʿarī theology. In the latter respect, al-Yūsī’s writings on causality are compared to those of his contemporary in Damascus, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, with attention to the broader historiographic perils in comparing intellectual developments in the Early Modern period to those occurring in Europe. By placing al-Yūsī’s views in intellectual context, I seek to demonstrate how a more productive history of the natural sciences in the post-formative Muslim world might be written.

Keywords categorization of knowledge – legal status of natural science – Morocco in the seventeenth century – post-formative intellectual developments in Islam * I would like to thank Khaled El-Rouayheb, Delfina Serrano, and Nathalie Peutz for their comments on various drafts of this article, and their many insightful suggestions. In addition I owe David Powers a great debt for his careful proofreading of a final draft. The two anonymous reviewers of the article provided numerous welcome corrections and suggestions, many of which I know I was unable to address sufficiently. Any remaining mistakes, obscure passages, and lapses in argument are mine alone. ISSN 0928-9380 (print version) ISSN 1568-5195 (online version) ILS1-2

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Introduction The intellectual history of the Muslim world during the post-formative era – a period that stretches from the rise of the Gunpowder Empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) in the 16th century to the arrival of European colonialism in the 19th century – is poorly understood, although scholars have in the past decades made significant advances in exploring developments in jurisprudence, mysticism, and theology during this period. The place of the philosophical (in the broadest sense) or rational sciences in Islamicate societies during these centuries remains obscure, doubtless in part due to the considerable developments, commonly glossed as the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, which took place in Europe during the same period. Historians interested in writing the history of the rational as opposed to the transmitted sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya vs. al-ʿulūm al-naqliyya) struggle with how to frame developments in the Muslim world without falling into the teleology of evaluating them against the perceived rise in Europe of a singular “modern science.” Similarly, they often have ended up valuing only those aspects of scholarship that present clear parallels with European writings. At its most egregious, this emphasis on European intellectual achievements – particularly those of the 17th century – and the lack of immediate parallels to them in the Muslim world, has led some to attribute a lack of “intellectual curiosity” to Muslim thinkers during this period.1 More productive for our understanding of the intellectual landscape of the Muslim world has been the attention paid to the continuing dynamism of Muslim scholarship during this period, and the ways in which this scholarship either paralleled or contributed to the achievements of European scholars.2 A related effort has been to focus on how the colonial encounter and scientific knowledge were constructed through the interaction between Europeans and

1 See Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 134, 142, and compare with Dan Diner, Lost in the Sacred: Why the Muslim World Stood Still (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Both Huff and Diner argue that the post-formative period of Muslim intellectual history was broadly characterized by stasis, and in doing so they echo the views of many Orientalists of the twentieth century. See Zachary Lockman Contending Visions of the Middle East (2nd edition) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104-112, but also W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2009 [1962]), part four of which is entitled: “The Period of Darkness: 1250-1900.” 2 See, for example, George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Boston: MIT Press, 2007).

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their local interlocutors.3 The aim of this article is different. Instead of focusing on contributions to, or parallels with, what is commonly referred to as modern science, it attempts to do something more modest: to establish the place and significance of the rational and natural sciences in one corner of the Islamicate world in the 17 and 18th centuries ce. By taking the example of a prominent scholar, al-Ḥasan b. Masʿūd al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691), whose prolific writings were influential both in Morocco and in the Ottoman Empire, and by situating him in his intellectual context, I show that the rational and philosophical sciences played a significant role in North Africa during this period. More importantly, I argue that we can gain a more accurate understanding of developments in these sciences if instead of (or at least before) reading them comparatively with European trends, we first establish a better and more nuanced understanding of the intellectual debates within Islamicate scholarship at this time. The exemplary articles of Khaled El-Rouayheb on the intellectual vibrancy of the Muslim world during the early modern period, and, most pertinently here, on the importance of al-Yūsī in the field of logic, provide a valuable example of how this can be done.4 Establishing the intellectual context of the study of the rational sciences in the Islamicate world during this period involves as much a rethinking of the categories of “science” and “progress” as it does offering up new evidence to challenge previous narratives of stasis or decline, be they implicit or explicit. A discussion of al-Yūsī’s writings demonstrates that the study of the natural world and the Greek natural philosophical tradition had a firm place in the Islamicate scholarship of 17th century Morocco. As important as explaining the significance of al-Yūsī’s thought is exploring how to do so without implicitly comparing it to contemporaneous European developments – a comparison that inevitably invites a misreading. In part to address this danger I have in the second half of the article contrasted al-Yūsī ’s understanding of causality in the natural world with that of a near contemporary of his at the other end of the 3 See Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which can be productively read with Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001). For a valuable examination of the role of trade and commerce in producing knowledge of the natural world, see Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 4 See below for detailed references to El-Rouayheb’s work. Important here as well, though with a different impetus, is the work of Nelly Hanna, especially her In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

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Mediterranean, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), who is discussed in terms of the European Enlightenment in a recent biography by Samer Akkach.5

Al-Yūsī, the Man and His Age Al-Ḥasan b. Masʿūd al-Yūsī is a towering figure in the intellectual landscape of 17th century Morocco. Known as a prominent scholar of Sufism, theology, and logic, and famed for his long and admonishing letter to the Alawite Sultan Moulay Ismāʿīl (r. 1672-1727), his significance in Moroccan history has been discussed by scholars of such varied interests and backgrounds as Jacques Berque, Clifford Geertz, ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-ʿAlawī al-Madgharī, Henry Munson Jr., and Kenneth Honerkamp.6 Despite his prominence, al-Yūsī was something of an intellectual outsider in his day, never fully accepted by the scholars of Fez, and largely formed by his initial education in the south of Morocco and subsequent residence in the Dilāʾ zāwiya between 1653 and 1668. Al-Yūsī arrived at the Dilāʾ zāwiya, which would be his home for the next fifteen years, at a moment of political turmoil in Morocco.7 The sherifian Saʿidian dynasty (1554-1603) had splintered following the death of Aḥmad al-Manṣūr in 1603 and for much of the 17th century no single political force united Morocco. Under the leadership of the third head of the Dilāʾ zāwiya, Muḥammad al-Ḥājj (r. 1636-68), the Dilāʾ zāwiya organized a formal military force and in the years prior to al-Yūsī’s arrival, had brought Meknes, Salé, Fez, and Tetouan under their control. The decade and a half that al-Yūsī spent in the zāwiya were tumultuous as the Dilāʾiyya progressively lost more and more territory to rivals in the north and to the sherifian ʿAlawite dynasty (1668-present) in the south. The ʿAlawites, who emerged as a political and military force in the southern city of Sijilmāsa in the first decades of the 17th century century, moved 5 See Samer Akkach, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007). 6 See Jacques Berque, Al-Youssi: Problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIème siècle (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1958); Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 29-35; ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-ʿAlawī al-Madgharī, al-Faqīh Abū ʿAlī al-Yūsī (Rabat: Wizārat al-awqāf wa’l-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya, 1989); Henry Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993), 1-34; Kenneth Honerkamp, “al-Ḥasan ibn Masʿūd al-Yūsī,” in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 1350-1850 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 410-19. Munson provides a close reading of al-Yūsi’s letter to Moulay Ismāʿīl in Religion and Power in Morocco, 27-31. 7 The locus classicus on the history of the Dilāʾ zāwiya is Muḥammad Hajji, al-Zāwiyya al-Dilāʾiyya wa-dawru-ha al-dīnī wa’l-ʿilmī wa’l-siyāsī (2nd Ed., Rabat: Kulliyyat al-Adab, 1988).

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north in the 1660s, razing the Dilāʾ zāwiya in 1668, as they extended their control over all of the far Maghrib. Despite external events, the time al-Yūsī spent in the zāwiya was a productive period for him, and he wrote with grief in his Discourses (Muḥāḍarāt) of witnessing the zāwiya’s eventual destruction. It was during his time at the zāwiya that he studied the use of the astrolabe with Muḥammad b. Saʿīd al-Marghīthī (d. 1089/1678), famous for a poem on timekeeping, and with a fellow student of al-Yūsī’s former instructor in logic and legal theory in Marrakesh, ʿĪsā al-Suktānī (d. 1062/1652). Despite the ambivalence of many Fāsī scholars towards al-Yūsī, in part the result of his having been favored by both Moulay Rashīd and Moulay Ismāʿīl (regardless of his criticisms of the latter), al-Yūsī attracted a large number of students, many of whom later settled in the Ottoman-controlled eastern Mediterranean, carrying his teachings and works with them.8 His numerous writings include a commentary on the influential theological creed of al-Sanūsī (d. 895/1490), a long theological commentary on the shahāda entitled Mashrab al-ʿāmm wa’l-khāṣṣ min kalimat al-ikhlāṣ, an extensive discussion of the nature of knowledge entitled al-Qānūn, his famous and unclassifiable Muḥāḍarāt, numerous letters, and his Fahrasa or account of his studies. Throughout these works we find al-Yūsī expressing broad support for the study of the natural and rational sciences, a tendency displayed most clearly in the taxonomy of knowledge he presented in al-Qānūn, an encyclopedia on the nature of knowledge and the proper comportment of both teacher and student.

Defining Legitimate Science in al-Yūsī’s Work Throughout the history of Islamicate societies, there has always existed some tension around the practice of the natural sciences, with certain sciences, such as medicine and astronomical time-keeping, being accepted and promoted by the majority of Muslim scholars, and others, such as astrology and magic, being viewed with suspicion (see the division given below).9 To be sure, the term “natural science” as used here had a broader range of signification than it does today, but this semantic shift reflects contemporary usage and the flexible appli8 See especially Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Sunni Muslim Scholars on the Status of Logic, 15001800,” Islamic Law and Society 11 (2004), 213-32, and idem, “Was there a Revival of Logical Studies in Eighteenth-Century Egypt?” Die Welt des Islams 45 (2005), 1-19. 9 See Justin Stearns, “Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the Pre-modern Muslim world: Historiography, Religion, and the Importance of the Early Modern Period,” History Compass, v. 9 (2011), 923-51.

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cation of the Arabic word ʿilm (science, knowledge), as seen in al-Yūsī’s use of the term in his al-Qānūn. Before taking up al-Yūsī’s own division of the sciences, it bears noting that he himself had studied logic, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, and medicine.10 His defense of the study of these subjects was rooted in his personal experience and familiarity with the matters he discussed. In al-Qānūn al-Yūsī divides the sciences broadly into the philosophical or ancient sciences and the Islamic sciences.11 The Muslim community should accept some of the sciences in the first category, while rejecting others. Those philosophical sciences that are generally accepted include the mathematical sciences (geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, music) and the natural sciences (human medicine, veterinary medicine, physiognomy, dream interpretation, astrology, magic, knowledge of talismans, letter magic [al-sīmiyāʾ], alchemy, and agriculture).12 Al-Yūsī observes that many of these sciences have been absorbed 10 11

12

See al-Yūsī, Fahrasat al-Yūsī (Casablanca: Dār al-Furqān, 2004), 121-3, 126, 139. Al-Yūsī, al-Qānūn (Rabat: Maṭbaʿat Shālat al-Ribāṭ, 1998), 146. Al-Yūsī defines philosophical knowledge as follows: “We say that knowledge is either desired for itself or for other than itself. The first of these is first philosophy (al-falsafa al-ʿūlā), the aim of which is the perfection of the rational animal, and to attain the true meanings of things through exertion. It is either theoretical or practical. The first is either absolute and abstract (mujarrad ʿan al-mādda muṭlaqan) and it is knowledge of the divine (al-ʿilm al-ilahī), or it is only in the mind, and this is mathematical knowledge (al-ʿilm al-riyāḍī ) or it is bound to matter, and this is natural science (al-ʿilm al-ṭabiʿī). The second is related to a person’s self … and is called the politics of the self and ethics …” (Ibid., 146). Only after completing a final draft of this article did I find a reference in a review article by Michael Brett to Jacques Berque’s discussion of this passage of al-Qānūn in his L’intérieur du Maghreb, XVe-XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 366-7. I hope to include Berque’s observations more fully in future work on al-Yūsī. See Michael Brett, “Jacques Berque and the history of the Maghreb,” The Maghreb Review 4 (1979), 140-8, here at 143. Al-Yūsī, al-Qānūn, 155. Strikingly, al-Yūsī permits the study of magic (siḥr), though solely for the purpose of recognizing it and knowing how to protect oneself from it (Ibid., 161, cp. Fahrasat al-Yūsī, 76). For earlier divisions of the sciences that al-Yūsī may well have been drawing on (although without acknowledgement), see Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 3 vols., Franz Rosenthal, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), v. 2, 436, Aḥmad b. Muṣṭafā Tāshkubrīzādah, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa misbāḥ al-siyāda fi mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm 4 vols, (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ḥadītha, 1968), 1: 371-5, and Ibn al-Akfānī, Irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā al-maqāṣid fī anwāʿ al-ʿulūm (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī, 1990), 190. Contrast these with al-Farabi’s much earlier Iḥsāʾ al-ʿUlūm (Beirut: Dār wa Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1996), 67-74. For overviews of the categorizations of the sciences in Islamicate thought, see the sources given in Stearns, “Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the pre-modern Muslim world,” 30-1. A useful discussion of al-sīmiyāʾ can be found in Pierre Lory, La Science des Lettres en Islam (Paris: Éditions Dervy, 2004), 37-44, but cp. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah,v. 3, 171-227.

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by Muslim scholars, many have been preserved by commoners engaged in agriculture or building, and, finally, many have not been used because they were not needed.13 After giving a detailed definition of each of these sciences, al-Yūsī argues that none of the philosophical sciences are to be rejected out of hand: There is no harm in any of them; we have no sympathy (naḥnu lā naltafitu ilā) for anyone who forbids any one of these sciences, for in its essence knowledge (ʿilm) is nourishment for the mind, pleasure for the soul, and an attribute of perfection (ṣifat al-kamāl). Indeed, the nobility of their fruits differs according to subject and goal, and the rulings [regarding their permissibility] differ according to intention.14 Al-Yūsī explains that even magic, which is forbidden by general consensus, may be studied for the purpose of learning how to differentiate between magic and miracles, while the study of literature, which is permitted by general consensus, may be forbidden if it is intended to ridicule that which should not be mocked. As the famous ḥadīth has it: “Verily, actions are to be judged by their intentions.”15 As a secondary justification for the study of the sciences of the ancients, al-Yūsī demonstrates how the study of logic, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and geometry, to name only a few, are all enjoined in the Qur’an.16 With his position thus bolstered, al-Yūsī is ready to cite opposing views. The first of these is that of Ibn Juzayy (d. 785/1383), a respected Granadan Mālikiī judge and scholar who argued in his legal work al-Qawānīn that all knowledge may be categorized according to (1) sciences of Revelation, (2) sciences that are tools of the Revelation, and (3) sciences that have no basis in Revelation. This last category may then be di...