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in David Thomas, & John Chesworth, Christian-Muslim Relations. a Bibliographical History. Volume 13 Western Europe (1700-1800), (Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 35-45.
Avner Ben-Zaken, “Intellectual, Scientific and Technological Relations between Christian and Muslim Civilizations 1580-1822”,2019 •
Scientific exchanges between Christian and Islamic civilizations passed through several phases from the Middle Ages onwards, each characterized in its own way. In medieval times, intellectually prosperous Islamic civilization passed works on natural philosophy in Arabic to Western Europe, giving the first impetus to the rise of a new form of intellectual inquiry in Europe. The result was not only a transformation in the structure of European universities but also the establishment of a new form of doctrine, based on incorporating Arabic Aristotelian works into the new Thomist theology. For over two centuries, up to the 15th century, Latin translations of the Arab philosophical corpus played a key role in the curricula of European intellectual institutions. But later, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, ancient Roman and Greek texts surfaced and were circulated, generating a new urge to read Aristotle directly, no longer through the mediation of the Arabs, thus opening the way in art, literature, and natural philosophy to the rise of the Renaissance.
This paper suggests that in the search for particular practices that escape biological determinism historians may be better off focusing on circulating men and cultural objects – on displaced figures – as they travel and adjust to new conditions. Strangers experience intense cognitive dissonance between the innate natural conditions of their upbringing and their cognitive values, and as such, these figures work out their mental capacities and exercise free-will more powerfully than well-embedded cultural figures. To adjust to new language and cultural practices, they wrestle with fixed habits. Natives, on the other end, experience estrangement when they encounter foreign cultural objects, reinterpret and place them in a fluid web of implied meanings. Both encounters generate sensations of estrangement, forcing humans to act beyond their inborn and habitual reactions. Therefore, in this current age of physical determinism, cultural networks and moving objects carry great potential in further developing cultural history and in re-stressing and maintaining culture as the expressive realm of the collective soul.
2015 •
In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their contemporary relevance. This article studies how Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947, understood the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufayl, and Arabo-Islamic philosophy generally. This modern generation of Arab scholars also attached significance to classical Arabic texts as precursors to modern European thought. They invited readers to retrospectively identify with Ibn Tufayl and his treatise, Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Comparisons of Ibn Tufayl to European thinkers, and re-presentations of Hayy ibn Yaqzan as the precedent or genesis of European thought, facilitated these editors’ global imaginaries, anti-colonial projects and political fantasies. This article tracks these projects and fantasies through the afterlife of Hayy ibn Yaqzan from early printings and generalist surveys to later editions and studies, as Ibn Tufayl’s significance became sutured into his imagined importance for Europe, and for going beyond Europe.
In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murād III invited Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn-Maʻārūf to build an observatory in Istanbul. Using his exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, Taqī al-Dīn constructed instruments and built mechanical clocks that he used in his observations of the comet of 1577. Such astronomical and mechanical activity was documented, in 1580, by an anonymous painter who illustrated some miniatures in a manuscript titled Shāhinshāhnāma. In the same decade, European astronomers, such as Tycho Brahe, built instruments and promoted a mechanical worldview of the celestial bodies. Although the scientific cultures coexisted for years, current historiography tends to present them as developing along separate linear paths. Yet, if we examine closely the peculiarities in one of the miniatures, we extract clues about a possible connection between Taqī al-Dīn’s and the European mechanical culture.
in Religious Individualisation. Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 1033-1063.
Avner Ben-Zaken, "Traveling with the Picatrix: Cultural Liminalities of Science and Magic"2020 •
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 41.3
Utopia’s Moorish Inspiration: Thomas More’s Reading of Ibn Ṭufayl2018 •
British Journal for The History of Science
Avner Ben-Zaken, "The Heavens of the Sky and the Heavens of the Heart: the Ottoman Cultural Context for the Introduction of Post-Copernican Astronomy", British Journal of History of Science, 37 (1: March 2004)2004 •
2009 •
Ben-Zaken, Avner. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011
Avner Ben-Zaken, "Defying Authority, Denying Predestination, and Conquering Nature: Florence, 1493"journal of Philosophical Investigations at university of Tabriz
full text of journal of Philosophical Investigations 2017 No. 21.pdfUniversity of Toronto Undergraduate Journal of Middle East Studies
"The Island" That Caused a Sea Change: Al Jazeera's Impact on the Egyptian Uprisings of 20112015 •
Journal of Early Modern History
On Renaissance Bazaars and Battlefields: Recent Scholarship on Mediterranean Cultural Contacts2011 •
Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam: Religious Learning between Continuity and Change
Islamic Education, Its Culture, Contents and Methods: An Introduction2020 •
Journal of Semitic Studies
Avner Ben-Zaken, "Recent Currents in the Study of Ottoman-Egyptian Historiography, with Remarks about the Role of the History of Natural Philosophy and Science", Journal of Semitic Studies XLIX/2 Autumn 2004.2004 •