Is (Islamic) Occult Science Science?

Abstract

More than any other object of historical and anthropological study, Islamicate occult science cuts to the quick of what it means to be modern, to be Western, to be scientific. Yet nowhere else are nineteenth-century colonialist metaphysics and materialist cosmology more firmly entrenched. The piecemeal, truncated study of “Magic in Islam” to date has thus often been pursued in service of either scientistic or religionist agendas, whereby magic can only ever be failed science or apolitical religion, and Islam can never be the West; Islamic Magic as simply Western and often imperial Science-and-Religion is thereby utterly disappeared from historiographical purview. This manifesto therefore proposes a way out of this dire epistemological and ethical bind. To restore Islamic Magic to its rightful place in Western intellectual and cultural history, especially history of science, we must take far more seriously the panpsychist cosmology on which it is predicated, and realize that our own reflexive materialism commits us willynilly to a colonialist agenda that is, ironically, both antireligious and antiscientific.