The majority of works written in Early Modern Morocco in the natural sciences remain in manuscript, which has made them difficult to access and evaluate. The chapter takes up astronomical, medical, and alchemical works to discuss the types of approaches scholars in Morocco used and the nature of the questions in which they were interested. Drawing on recent work in the field, it demonstrates that the occult sciences, including lettrism, were part and parcel of this project and that Moroccan scholars produced innovative syntheses and commentaries throughout the period in consideration.

How did we come to think of the Early Modern period as one of intellectual decline in the Middle East? This Introduction reviews how narratives of the development of the natural sciences have been previously constructed and lays out an alternative history of intellectual vibrancy in Early Modern Morocco in which the natural sciences were considered revealed and divinely sanctioned.

In order to reconstruct the nature and place of the natural sciences in Early Modern Moroccan thought, this chapter reviews biobiogragraphical dictionaries, intellectual autobiographies, and works on the categorization and transmission of the sciences from the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. This survey reveals that the natural sciences were an accepted, if minority pursuit, and that prominent scholars such as al-Yūsī saw them as divinely revealed and playing an important role in furthering the good of the Muslim community.

In order to reconstruct the nature and place of the natural sciences in Early Modern Moroccan thought, this chapter reviews biobiogragraphical dictionaries, intellectual autobiographies, and works on the categorization and transmission of the sciences from the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. This survey reveals that the natural sciences were an accepted, if minority pursuit, and that prominent scholars such as al-Yūsī saw them as divinely revealed and playing an important role in furthering the good of the Muslim community.

The majority of works written in Early Modern Morocco in the natural sciences remain in manuscript, which has made them difficult to access and evaluate. The chapter takes up astronomical, medical, and alchemical works to discuss the types of approaches scholars in Morocco used and the nature of the questions in which they were interested. Drawing on recent work in the field, it demonstrates that the occult sciences, including lettrism, were part and parcel of this project and that Moroccan scholars produced innovative syntheses and commentaries throughout the period in consideration.

While acknowledging the disproportionate role of Islamic jurisprudence in studies of Islam generally, as a body of texts it provides a valuable site to trace the ways in which the natural sciences were on the one hand instrumentalized and appropriated by jurists to address ritual and social issues, and on the other demonstrates how these sciences provided the basis for legal thinking. The case of the Great Smoking Debate of the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries is discussed at length to show in detail how medicine shaped legal categories.

How did we come to think of the Early Modern period as one of intellectual decline in the Middle East? This Introduction reviews how narratives of the development of the natural sciences have been previously constructed and lays out an alternative history of intellectual vibrancy in Early Modern Morocco in which the natural sciences were considered revealed and divinely sanctioned.

Despite the evidence advanced in this book, its main historiographical contributions will fail to be effective it we cannot rethink our understandings of intellectual vibrancy and engagement with the natural sciences, both of which continued beyond the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century.

Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions provides a way to think of the development of the natural sciences in the Muslim world as differing from the path taken in Europe while also reflecting broad engagement with the sciences. This excursus argues for a weak version of Kuhn's paradigm to better understand the divergent fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world.

Despite the evidence advanced in this book, its main historiographical contributions will fail to be effective it we cannot rethink our understandings of intellectual vibrancy and engagement with the natural sciences, both of which continued beyond the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century.

Chapter Four explores proposals for the creation of a postwar United Nations air force in Britain and the United States during the Second World War. Aviation, the chapter shows, emerged as a central component of internationalist campaigns for the creation of a postwar international security organization. Allied aerial ascendancy appeared to offer the opportunity, and the aeroplane the perfect tool, for the creation of a new system of collective security and international governance. By examining discussions and proposals within internationalist organizations and state planning committees, the chapter examines the coalition of interests which formed in support of the force. In the United States, it was supported by proponents of international law and of a strong United Nations Organization, and by a lobby keen to see the expanded wartime aviation industry used for postwar peacekeeping. In Britain meanwhile support was built on visions of joint Anglo-American policing of the world, and hopes of British influence over an integrated postwar Europe. An international air force was incorporated into the blueprint for a United Nations Organization at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, and although the force was never formed it remains a part of the United Nations Charter to this day.

In February 1963, not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, David Lilienthal gave a series of lectures on nuclear weapons at Princeton University. As a leading US policymaker on atomic matters in the late 1940s (including as the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission), Lilienthal had been instrumental in shaping early policy on the atomic bomb. Now, in the aftermath of the deepest nuclear crisis to envelop the United States, he conceded that his, and society’s, earlier thinking on the bomb had turned out to be incorrect. ‘We have been following a myth’, he exclaimed, ‘an illusion about the Atom’.