760 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 43 (2011) of The Nights itself. A similar carelessness appears in the following chapter, which places the Old French Song of Roland in the context of its “Persian prototype” Vis and Ramin (p. 101). As with The Nights, Azinfar cites an older translation of Vis and Ramin instead of the current scholarly standard, Dick Davis’ splendid work. More disturbing, however, is her misrepresentation of the prevalent view concerning the relationship of the Persian poem to European literary history: far from endorsing a history of “influence” of Vis and Ramin on poems such as the medieval European Tristan, as Azinfar claims (p. 115; cf. 133–34), scholars such as Peter Dronke take note of the common ground found in these medieval poems—that is, the intersection of human, erotic love with more detached, philosophical views of mankind’s place in the cosmos. Subsequent chapters continue in the same vein, making sweeping arguments for the influence of the literature and philosophy of medieval Persia and, more broadly, the Islamic world on European poetry. It is crucial to emphasize that there are such arguments to be made: points of cultural interaction, whether through poetics, philosophy, medicine, or science, have repeatedly linked European and Islamic history and culture throughout the Middle Ages. Azinfar, however, does not make any such specific arguments, even where we might expect her to do so; after all, the dust jacket provided by Ibex Publishers cites Azinfar as the author of other books on philosophy, including Reconsidering Aristotle and The Event is Being: Existentialism, Philosophy, and Modernism. (I was not able to find any bibliographical record for these books in online sources.) Azinfar’s treatment of medieval philosophers such as Abelard and Boethius, found in Chapters 4 and 5, is remarkably weak, and references to philosophers of other periods (from the Marquis de Sade to Kant) are fleeting. Atheism in the Medieval Islamic and European World bears many marks of its status as an unrevised dissertation, including not only the lack of scholarly citations more recent than the mid-1990s but also extremely long (sometimes as much as three pages) quotations from secondary sources and citations of conference papers from the 1990s in the place of their subsequent published versions (e.g., 69n5). There is no bibliography or list of works cited, and works cited in the footnotes are not listed by author in the short index, making them difficult to find. The topic is a fascinating one, and the effort to highlight the very real, substantial links between Europe and the Islamic world is of the utmost value, not only to scholars but also to the wider world today. It is to be hoped that the appetite of readers for books such as Azinfar’s Atheism is soon satisfied by more substantial fare. AVNER BEN-ZAKEN, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560– 1660 (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. 256. $60.00 cloth. REVIEWED BY JUSTIN STEARNS, Arab Crossroads Studies Program, NYU–Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; e-mail: jstearns@nyu.edu doi:10.1017/S0020743811001061 In this book, Avner Ben-Zaken intends to reread scientific and cultural exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the century following the death of Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543), whose theory of heliocentrism was an important precedent for the scientific developments in the 16th and 17th centuries that are often glossed as the Scientific Revolution. In the introduction, Ben-Zaken argues that by tracing the way in which the theories of Copernicus circulated in the Eastern Mediterranean, and by contextualizing the cultural concerns and priorities of European and Ottoman astronomers, his book offers a “cross-cultural reevaluation of the ‘Scientific Revolution’“ (p. 6). Yet, while Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges offers a series of fascinating studies that emphasize how for some Europeans interaction Reviews 761 with Middle Eastern Muslim and Jewish scholars, manuscripts, and landscapes was culturally intensely productive, it offers less evidence for influence in the other direction and will likely lead few to credit cultural exchange with a prominent role in the “Scientific Revolution” (p. 7). Chapter 1 explores the comparative significance of the observatories and astronomical research of Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma‘ruf (d. 1585) and Tycho Brahe (d. 1601) at the courts of the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (rl. 1574–95) and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612). Whereas the scholars who ran the last observatory of the Muslim world and the first of the European world have rarely been depicted as having connections with the other’s cultural sphere, Ben-Zaken argues that both were shaped by cross-cultural experiences. Much of the initial discussion here is centered on the content and illustrations of a poem, the Shahinshahnama, which was written in Persian by an ‘Ala’ al-Din al-Mansur and describes the early reign of Murad III (rg. 1574–95). The poem argues in part for the development of a new knowledge of the heavens and praises Taqi al-Din (p. 11). Because this example is one of the author’s most striking and the style of his argument here is paralleled in subsequent chapters, his exploration of possible European influences on Taqi al-Dın will be described in some detail. In the miniature accompanying the manuscript of the Shahinshahnama, Taqi al-Din’s observatory is depicted to include a globe and a mechanical clock. Ben-Zaken notes a connection between the former and a globe auctioned off by Christie’s in 1991 that was made in Antwerp in 1579 and dedicated to Murad III, and which depicted the new world. As for the clock, Taqi al-Din was the first Muslim known to have constructed a mechanical clock and to give it the name bankamat. Similar to some of his European contemporaries, Taqi al-Din described nature as a machine and, influenced by alchemy and hermeticism, believed that clocks and mechanical devices could help reveal the “spiritual structure of the heavens” (p. 17). Ben-Zaken is intrigued by a reference Taqi al-Din made to having benefitted from sources from other religions and explores the circumstantial evidence suggesting that he had opportunity to study with the Jewish mathematician David Ben-Shushan, who moved to Constantinople in 1574. More important, since Taqi al-Din would have had to acquire most of his knowledge of clocks and astronomy before this date, Ben-Zaken gives considerable credence to a rumor reported by the Habsburg envoy in Constantinople, Salomon Schweigger (d. 1622), that Taqi al-Din had twelve captured Christians working for him and that he himself spent some time as a prisoner in Rome, where he worked for a mathematician. The considerable evidence Ben-Zaken lays out here for European influence on Taqi al-Din is circumstantial and, while intriguing, hardly conclusive enough to draw conclusions in regard to Taqi alDin’s scientific pursuits or early modern Ottoman science in general. To continue the detective metaphor introduced by the author (p. 6), there is certainly enough here for an investigation, though it is doubtful that the evidence would be sufficient enough to stand up in a court of law. In the second part of this first chapter, Ben-Zaken turns to Tycho Brahe and argues that Brahe’s interest in the Middle East was not only astrological—he predicted with some inexactitude the death date of Süleiman the Magnificent—but that he also corresponded with Danish students in Italy who had been to the Middle East (p. 29). Much of the rest of the chapter is devoted to describing the importance of astrology at the Ottoman and Hapsburg courts of the late 16th century as a field of political and religious competition between Europe and the Middle East. Ben-Zaken ends the chapter by arguing that Tycho Brahe and Taqi alDin cannot be seen as having occupied separate worlds but that diverse people and scientific objects moved back and forth “from one culture to the other” (p. 46). Ben-Zaken’s methodology of carefully arraying disparate pieces of evidence related to the importance of the Middle East in European—and to a much lesser extent Europe in Middle Eastern—scientific thought continues in the book’s remaining chapters. Chapter 2 begins with 762 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 43 (2011) the Italian Pietro della Valle (d. 1652) and his attempt to translate a summary overview of the Tychonic system into Persian in order to convince the Persian astronomer Mullah Zayn al-Din al-Lari to convert to Christianity. The remainder of the chapter explores della Valle’s interest in finding an “ur-text of the Book of Job” in order to find scriptural support for Copernicus’ assertion that the earth moved (p. 49) and his association with a number of Neapolitan scholars who hoped to find support for the work of Galileo in pre-Islamic Greek and Chaldean Middle Eastern manuscripts. Ben-Zaken concludes the chapter by arguing that this debate “extended the Galilean affair into the ancient Near East” (p. 74). Perhaps so, but the inhabitants of the 17th-century Middle East hardly seem to have noticed. Chapter 3 examines the career of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Jewish scholar and selffashioned disciple of Galileo from Amsterdam who traveled to Cairo and Constantinople between 1616 and 1619 looking for Jewish, predominately Karaite and Cabalist, sources to demonstrate that Jewish authorities once knew of the discoveries made by Gentile scholars of his day. Delmedigo wrote his Sefer Elim in a deliberately obscure fashion out of worry that his sources would incur the ire of the rabbinically controlled presses of Amsterdam. In his conclusion, Ben-Zaken suggests that one of the few readers of Delmedigo who may have understood him, Spinoza, could have been influenced by his call for “a Jewish radical enlightenment” (p. 103). Chapter 4 is centered on the English astronomer John Greaves (d. 1652), who traveled in the Middle East between 1637 and 1640 and subsequently occupied the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford before losing his position during England’s Civil War due to his royalist sympathies. Shortly before his death he published a Latin translation of a 15thcentury astronomical work from Persia (p. 104). Greaves hoped to defend Brahe’s theories against heliocentrism and in doing so was sponsored by two English archbishops who sought ancient Middle Eastern authorities to support their theological and political objectives. At the end of the chapter, Ben-Zaken notes that Newton read Greaves’ work and shared his belief in universal measurements that had been lost (most significantly for Newton, the cubit). It is unclear how this last observation strengthens Ben-Zaken’s overall argument for the importance of cultural exchange to our understanding of early modern science. The fifth chapter is dedicated to tracing Ottoman scholar Ibrahim Efendi al-Zigetvart Tezkireci’s translation of an astronomical work by Noël Duret—presented in 1634 to Cardinal Richelieu—into Arabic in 1660. Ben-Zaken’s interest here is in arguing that Tezkireci was interested not in heliocentrism but in Duret’s arrangement of the astronomical tables of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho, and Lansbergen and in the influence of the Sufi concept of idrak (illuminist apperception) for reconciling observations with astronomical models (p. 142). At the close of the chapter, Ben-Zaken emphasizes the degree to which Sufism can be seen to have characterized Muslim astronomers’ ability to trust each other as “true lovers of truth” (p. 161). The book’s conclusion returns to Ben-Zaken’s central thesis that early modern science in Europe and the Middle East was the product of “exchanges at the cultural margins” (p. 166) and that claims of these two cultures’ “incommensurability” are to be rejected. This book contains a series of fascinating case studies, each of which adds incrementally to our understanding of the role and nature of science and scientific practices in the early modern period. In grouping them together, though, the author makes broad claims that go unsubstantiated and erects “straw man” oppositional arguments that are largely unconvincing. Although Ben-Zaken is able to demonstrate that the experiences of European travelers to the Middle East provided material for internal European debates in regards to the theories of Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo and to show how these debates were situated in relation to theological and political tensions, the evidence for an Ottoman or Muslim interest in or appropriation of European knowledge for similar purposes is thin, to say the least. It would Reviews 763 have helped considerably if the author used more space to explain what exactly he means by “early modern science” and was more precise about the understanding of the narrative of early modern science he wishes to alter (pp. 165–66). As it stands, there is little reason to believe that, for example, the translations of either Graves or Tezkireci, while fruitful sites in which to explore how their authors conceived of authoritative science, influenced subsequent scientific research in either Europe or the Middle East. Finally, Ben-Zaken’s book suffers from the author’s not referencing some of the most relevant secondary sources that deal with the very figures and topics he examines. Particularly glaring is the omission—with the exception of a reference to one short essay (p. 183)—of the work of Sonja Brentjes, who has written numerous articles over the past decade on precisely this subject (and on some of the very figures under discussion here!): the influence of European travelers in the Middle East on the transmission of knowledge and the historiography of science more broadly (many of these are now collected into one volume as Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th–17th centuries [Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Variorum, 2010]). CrossCultural Scientific Exchanges will doubtlessly prove useful for those interested in the history of science in Europe and the Middle East during these centuries, but the author would have achieved more by claiming less for his case studies. ILHAM KHURI-MAKDISI, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, Calif.: The University of California Press, 2010), Pp. 296. $45.00 cloth. REVIEWED BY SALIM TAMARI, Department of Sociology, Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine; e-mail: stamari@palestine-studies.org doi:10.1017/S0020743811001073 The publication of this pathbreaking study of radical movements in pre-World War I Egypt and Syria could not have been better timed, occurring as it has on the eve of the momentous events that have engulfed virtually every Middle East state that emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The book highlights the hidden history of groups, mass movements, and classes that can be considered early precursors to popular movements that materialized during the period of the Anglo-French Mandates and have more recently been mythically caricaturized as the Arab street. The Eastern Mediterranean challenges three major entrenched assumptions about 19thcentury Arab modernity: first, that the 19th-century Arab nahd.a was basically a nationalist and predominantly bourgeois movement of Syrian-Lebanese intellectuals and immigrants; second, that it was a regional movement unconnected to global ideological upheavals; and third, that it was a literary political Arabist movement devoid of a social agenda and a revolutionary perspective. Khuri-Makdisi casts her work as a new interpretation of the nahd.a by systematically throwing light on previously unexamined or underexamined groups and sources. These include syndicalist and labor movements, theater and dramatic groups, municipal archives, migratory networks linking the Syrian littoral to Egypt and urban centers in the new world (notably, São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and New York), and—most important—the biographical trajectories of scores of radical writers and activists, many of whom have been relegated to oblivion by the ascendancy of nationalist discourse. The careers and intellectual output of Farah Anton, Amin Rihani, Sayyid Rida, and many others are re-examined in light of their contributions to the creation of a hitherto unknown socialist and radical discourse. The author unveils a silenced and marginalized narrative whose