Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book. His several forthcoming books include The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic, and he is co-editor of the volumes Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (2017) and Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (2020). Taken together, his body of work to date constitutes a new analytical framework for the study of early modern Persianate societies—one which retrieves Islamic Magic as a crucial category for interrogating the construction of Western early modernities, and hence scientific modernity, more broadly.
OBJECT: Samuel M. Zwemer (comp.), Kitāb al-Ruḥiyāt (Cairo, circa 1915). [From the John Hay Library’s David E. Pingree Collection, Call No. BP87.5 .K57]
[CATALOGER’S NOTE: This volume contains 19 individually published Arabic works on magic, Islamic occultism, and esoteric sciences, all printed in Egypt — specifically, Cairo — in the first decade of the 20th century, as collected by and bound for Samuel Zwemer. These works are linked individually below, in the order in which they appear within the bound volume:]
Nafa al-Bariāh ʻalā al-hurūf (3)
Kitāb sirr al-asrār fī istiḥḍār al-jinn (5)
al- Fayḍ al-rabbānī fī ʻilm (7)
Hibat al-mannān fī istiḥḍār (8)
al- Asrār al-Ilāhīyah fī fawāʼid al-ṭibb (9)
Kitāb mujarrabāt al-buyūt fī al-tibb (10)
al- Luʼluʼ al-manẓūm fī al-ṭalāsim (11-12)
al- Fayḍ al-rabbānī fī ʻilm (13)
Kitāb al-Sirr al-Rabhānī fī ʻUlūm (14)
Kitāb al-sirr al-qātiʻ fī ʻilm (15)
Hādhā Kitāb al-faṣl fī uṣūl (16)
Kitāb al-durr al-naẓīm fī ḥawāṣṣ (17)
Kitāb Mujarrabāt al-ʻālim al-ʻallāmah (18)
Kitāb al-fayḍ al-mutawālī fī Muthallath (19)