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Welcome to the new books network. All alone welcome to new books in Islamic Studies, a postcast channel on a new books network. I'm your host, Ahmadine Masme, a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Today we are here to talk to Dr.
Leona Saif, who is a historian focused on Islamic, his autism and the occult sciences and the medieval period from the 8th to the 13th century. She has co-edited the highly anticipated volume, Islamicate, called Sciences, Theory and Practice with Francisco Leone, Varucheja and Matthew Melvynkoski, published by Brell in 2020. And now also on paperback. Dr.
Leona Saif pays special attention to intercultural exchanges of esoteric and occult ideas between the Islamicate and Latin-8 worlds, all the way to the European Renaissance. As reflected in her first monograph, the Arabic influences when early modern were called Philosophy, published by Pálgrav MacMellan in 2015. She explores there the Islamic scientific and natural philosophical foundations of the theories of astral influences that naturalized between quotes astrology and astral magic, becoming sciences that explore the dynamics that link the terrestrial and celestial worlds. Thus co-producing knowledge about nature and the cosmos and resulting in a universe more intelligible to both Muslim scientists and philosophers and their European counterparts.
Today's book, Islamicate, a called Sciences, and Theory and Practice, brings together the latest research on Islamicical sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies, but also a material culture. But AIM is not only to showcase the range of binary work that is currently being done in these areas, but also to provide a module for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this pursuing field of study. Furthermore, the book provides the rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial sphere and to dialogue together. We'll conduct a little save to your books in Islamic studies, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk about the book.
Thank you so much, Ahmed, for inviting me to talk about this book, and I hope that I will be able to represent it as well and make my co-editors happy. Thank you for joining the broadcast. We would like first to learn about you. Can you please start us off by saying a few words about yourself?
That is where you grow up, where you went to school, how you became interested in your field of study, and if you would like to mention any influential mentors you would like to mention. Sure. I got my bachelor degrees at the University of Jordan in Amman, and it is in English literature and languages. So far away from the world of history of science or philosophy or intellectual history.
But also it was very important in introducing me or allowing me a chance to study deeper, for example, the Renaissance, which I was interested in Renaissance literature and Renaissance theater during that time. But of deep influence on me during my studies at the University of Jordan was Professor Sahiban Khalifa Atrahemla, and he used to be the professor of philosophy, and he instructed, he gave me class on philosophy, and I took a course with him on logic. And he was a very demanding character, but someone who really encouraged into the disciplinarity and kind of opened my eyes to the rich way in which philosophy can even inform thinking and reading, thinking about and reading literature. So he, I would say he was a huge influence during that time.
And then after I finished my BA, I went to London to get an MA in Renaissance studies this time at Berkbeck College, University of London. And it's interdisciplinary MA program. So you have classes on art history, you have classes on Shakespeare, etc. But also there was this one class that I took called Magic Science and Religion and Religious Belief.
And it was taught by Dr. Peter Forsho, who became my MA supervisor and who is also now my colleague at the University of Amsterdam, Center for the Study of Hermetic Philosophy, which is a very cool twist of fate, I would say. So he was, he was in that class, he was very encouraging of thinking about the material through the Arabic sources. And I was very excited and enthusiastic about the perspective.
I could offer the study of early modern book called Philosophy because that class centered more on obviously Renaissance periods of early modern book called Philosophy. And yeah, he was very enthusiastic about what I can offer from the perspective of the of the Arabic sources. And so this basically became the subject of my PhD, which I continued at Berkbeck, but with supervision from Professor Charles Burnett at the Warbeck Institute. And that, that team of supervision, including Professor Charles Burnett, who was, you know, the superstar in the study of Magic in the Medieval Period.
So I've, he became like a mentor for me. And I remained very grateful to Professor Burnett for his continuous support and real investment in my academic success. Yeah, he was, he's so generous with his research and discovery. And he still instills in me kind of a deep appreciation of comparative philology, especially in Latin and Arabic.
And so the thesis ultimately led to my book and the book was the Arabic influences on early modern occult philosophy. So yeah, and after my PhD, I spent some time working on the monograph. And then as you said, it got published in 2015. After PhD, I worked at the British Museum as the curator of the Hage Legacy Project, working with Venetia Fwitter, who, who is the curator of the, the career of the Islamic collection.
And she played a huge role in the development of my knowledge of material culture side of things when it comes to the cult sciences, having authored herself a catalog of the British Museum's sales and talismans. So that became really influential on, on, on, even the vision that we had for the book Islamic Etocult Sciences of the urgency to start talking together. And so after that, I was very lucky to also be mentored by Professor Emmett E. Savage Smith.
She supported my British Academy Post-Victorial Fellowship application at Oxford St. Cross. And and I ended up succeeding in obtaining the Fellowship for Project on Magic and Medieval Islam. So I was very lucky to encounter a very generous and very influential mentors, really.
Thank you for sharing that. Let's now turn to the book in its chapters. The book is divided into 14 chapters in two parts. The first part is called Theories, Inception and Reception.
And the second part is Occal Technologies from Instruction to Action. But first, can you share with us how did this volume come about what motivated your interest in this particular project? Sure. I think it's a number of circumstances basically came together that made the idea viable.
But it started more thinking it was one of the suggested outcomes to, no, let me, let me repeat that. So yeah, at the beginning, it was a conference. So the book is the edited volume that followed a conference that was co-organized with Frances Gélioni in Oxford at the Bodleian Library. So, and there were several circumstances basically that led to the conference and made it viable and even necessary.
So after my stint at the British Museum, as I said to you, I became more interested in the relationship between the intellectual history of the occult sciences and the material culture evidence. And this led to meeting Dr. Frances Gélioni, who is the art historian curator of Islamic art at the Ashmolean Museum. And at that time, I joined the advisory board of her lever-homes supported highly acclaimed exhibition, Power and Protection, Islamic Art and the Supernatural, which opened in October 2016.
And Francesca was working, before that Francesca was working on her Louvre Home application. At the same time, I was working on my British Academy post-doctoral fellowship. So early on, we were both keen on bridging the gap between the conversation on the occult sciences from the art material culture world and the intellectual history. And it is in this context that I met Dr.
Faruqiaia, who is the author of Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated manuscripts. And he continues to produce cutting-edge research on the occult sciences in Southeast Asia. And he was working at Oxford at that time. So that's one set of circumstances.
But also, there's another set of circumstances where, you know, by the time of the exhibition, Francesca exhibition, a group of PhDs and early career scholars researching Islamic at occult sciences were starting to coalesce. And they were tackling themes that were very complementary to one another, such as me, but there was also Matthew Malvin-Kushki, who works on the early modern letters context. There was Noah Gartner, who worked on the Mamluk context with a focus on letters and Hamid al-Buni, Jean-Shakulon, who was working on Magic in the Medieval context as well. And he looked at their culmination in the works of al-Buni as well.
So like the scholarship of this group was also encapsulated in a special volume in Eremica that was edited by Malvin-Kushki and Gartner, and that entitled Islamic et al-Cultism New Perspectives. And that was an outcome of a conference in Princeton that was organized by Malvin-Kushki. So PhDs that time also played a huge role, someone like Michael Sebastian Noble, who was doing his research at the Warburg Institute. And he recently published a monograph entitled Philosophizing the Ocult.
There was also Bing Callum, who was doing research on Arabic translations of Greek alchemical literature. And he also worked at the British Library, so in his capacity as Arabic scientific manuscripts curator. So you can see from different parts of academia, but even the Cultural Center, there were people working and coming together. So it made sense at that time to collaborate.
And that's when Malvin-Kushki joined the team. And at the same time, to give you an idea about how vibrant that moment was, at the same time in the University of Catholic-Dilevan, a research group funded by consecutive ERC grants obtained by Professor Godfadikalatai, focusing on alchemy and the occult sciences, on the writings of the Juan de Cefan others, that was happening. And I was lucky to be part of these projects once as a postdoc researching Juan de Cefan at another time for research on the magic of Jabbat ibn Hayan. And a major player of this group is my colleague and friend Sebastian Mugho, who works on Islamic et alchemy and magic and astrology on a range of texts such as Al-Hakim and Juan de Cefan.
So it made a lot of sense to bring all of that together in a conference, and then that conference led to the volume. That's great to hear about how the institutional and the collegial networks intersected to produce such a fabulous volume. Looking at the title Islamic et al sciences, we have two buzzwords. Maybe some of our listeners wouldn't actually understand what do they mean.
So can you please elaborate on the significance of the term Islamic et in relation to occult sciences and vice versa? In other words, how does this concept help us understand the interconnectedness of Islamic and non-Islamic influences on occult practices within Muslim majority societies, but also the Muslim influences on the development of the so-called occult sciences? Yeah, Islamic et al. In general, I tend to use it to allow for occult scientific texts and ideas that have not been developed by Muslims but are produced in dominantly Islamic culture.
Texts that I study as the Sudharseti in Hermetica, for example, I feel fit well within that category. I also use it to talk about ideas that have come part and parcel of occult scientific thinking that's been elaborated by Muslim, and these could be Greek, Jewish, Zoroastian, Christian, elements, etc. However, I am aware of the pitfalls of this type of use, but in Travis Zadda's brilliant postscript of the volume, this issue is addressed and this simplification that I just shared is nuanced much more in Travis' postscript where he stresses that one of the unintended consequences in this approach to account for all kinds of cultural complexities is to associate the Islamic with orthodoxy and Islamicate with the heterodox. So here, Sufism, Dokal sciences and Isutarism become part of a thing that does not fit with Islam, therefore cannot be Islamic and can only be marginal or non-normative when in fact the volume emphasizes the normativity of the occult sciences really in Islamic cultures.
Can we delve deeper into this to address the question of legitimacy and authority within the realm of Islamic etical sciences? What factors determine the acceptance or rejection of certain practices or beliefs within Muslim communities? This is a very good question, but I would say that one of the aspects that I wished was more present in the volume is a comprehensive study on the theological debates on the premisibility of the occult sciences. And what is interesting really actually is that a lot of us in this field worked so hard to like quote unquote legitimize the study of the occult sciences and take it away from the shadow of legitimacy and superstition so that we are able to place them in the right place in Islamic history and Islamic sciences and philosophy and cosmology, etc.
Which you can say at least for me kind of pushed me away from talking about the question of legitimacy from a theological perspective. So what we ended up focusing on with the type of legitimacy that we started focusing on is the legitimacy of narratives about the occult sciences and about the development of the occult sciences. So you know the lot and this was discussed in relation to how the occult sciences were presented through orientalist methodologies or we started addressing post enlightenment denigrations of the study of the occult and what is the better methodologies for understanding them beyond associating them with the superstitious, the irrational or or something that is irrelevant. In relation to Greek authorities as well, the occult sciences a lot of the time found in legitimization through referring to Greek authorities and so one of the ways that we needed to look at the occult sciences through is how do we reevaluate the way Greekness and Greek knowledge is incorporated into the occult sciences.
I'm really sorry Ahmed but there's a lot of noise outside. Yes so if we move on from theology to think about other ways of addressing legitimacy and authority perhaps from within the Islamic you know occult sciences as well how would you think about these questions? I mean the occult sciences and occult practices are ubiquitous in Islamic and non-Islamic cultures and so there were different groups who were claiming to have real understanding of how these things works and you know this is a simplification of course but in at least the period that I studied which is approximately eight to the 13th century it seems to be natural philosophers and Sufis at the later point so natural philosophers were basically looking at epistemological strategies to understand occult sciences and the phenomena that these sciences address through nature, through cosmology and so Greek authorities were of deep importance to them and so Aristotle for example would provide a kind of a holomorphism that you can explain with the efficacy of the talisman as body form and the stars are the efficient agents in some cases like we see in the 10th century famous magic text and so you know that was how natural philosophers thought about it but also at the same time there were the more esoteric communities that were thinking about occult sciences and occult practices as the privilege of a spiritual elite for example and we can think about the way that the science of letters developed among the Sufis milieu and the science of the letters draws from a different cosmological model where the letters and divine names become the main principles of creation and all of created things kind of like the essences and I'm here reducing it as well a little bit but also you know that intersected with the neoplatonic framework so you cannot really say that the divide between natural philosophy and Sufis discourse on the occult is very clear but yeah at least in the period that I studied those were the authorities those were the groups that were thinking about the occult sciences theoretically and in terms of legitimate cosmological framework to to to to understanding the occult sciences but I do think however that it is still a worthwhile question about the the construction of theological legitimacy of the Islamic occult sciences one of the aspects that I do wish was more presented as the volume in the volume is is indeed looking at the theological debates on the permissibility and legitimacy of the occult sciences but I guess because a lot of us wanted to move away from studying the occult sciences as a problem or as something illegitimate or something superstitious we kind of like haven't or at least I haven't tackled this issue systematically I think either but that is very important in talking about how legitimacy and this course is of legitimacy of the occult sciences developed and trends and their diversity as well right I thinking about these discourses one of the critiques to intellectual history at large and just the field of Islamic studies or the occult sciences is that it can be sometimes disembodied from context so what are some of the main historical and cultural contexts in which Islamic ethical sciences emerge and developed you've mentioned the work of Roorhya in Southeast Asia perhaps the other context you would like to mention from the volume and how did these contexts shape our understanding of the theories and practices involved absolutely well I mean when it comes to the Islamic et al cult sciences there is we're still trying to find out more about these cultural contexts and it's still an ongoing project and it's one of the most exciting aspects of the of the study that is now blooming so much so historically speaking I mean the pre-Islamic traditions were an important context historical and cultural context you know the Arabian Peninsula before the advent of Islam had a rich array of pre-existing beliefs and practices including various forms of polytheistic you know religions that had or traditions that had their own occult practices for example divination in particular was important so you know the Arabs were noted in many early sources as being experts par excellence in the arts of divination like Ayafa, Ayafa, Zajal, Liro etc so and even in the Sanilat the philologist Ibn Manzur he mentions that the Arabs were very knowledgeable diviners and he mentions famous diviners like Sheqt and Sattra. So that's a context that is worth I think deep into of course in in the early Islamic intellectual milieu there's a diverse range of intellectual currents that thrived at that time whether it was drawing from Greek philosophy Persian thought and Indian and Chinese influences you know at that time the translation movement aimed to translate and preserve and comment and develop ancient Greek knowledge and translate them into Arabic and that brought a wealth of esoteric knowledge into the Islamic world as well so we can also talk about the Sufi context right so as I mentioned earlier Sufism proposed a view of the cosmos where letters and divine names become the building blocks of creation and they constitute the formulae if you will for interacting with natural celestial and divine realities and so that context is is super influential but you can even say that you know even the Sufi letterist context emerged from a wider Mediterranean context where and Mediterranean traditions of alphanumeric cosmological speculation that include the Kabbalah the jabrian science of balance and min mizan and of course the science of letters and and and divine names so yeah that becomes very important of course the Persianate and central Asian influences are important and the context are important whether it was you know the observatories such as the Maraga Observatory or the Samarkand Observatory and and near if we add the zid literature and the depth to Indian astronomy that is quite an important aspect of it the Persianate and Ottoman political and military context also is an important cultural context where the occult sciences were basically mobilized politically and explicitly and this is studied by Matthew Melkoshki, Maria Medjjar and Maria Satelini in this in this volume I think another context that is not represented in the volume but is important to think about is the Byzantine context I think that our knowledge of Islamicate occult sciences would benefit much more from studies on the Byzantine occult sciences and their connection to the Islamicate ones and here I'm thinking of the works of Maria Mavrudhi who has led the conversation basically about Byzantine occult sciences and she edited a volume with Paul Magdalino entitled to consciences in Byzantine so yeah there's so much more that can be said I think we also would have benefited if we had more explanation of the South Asian context which is not well represented in the volume and also the the African context as well so yeah all of these are very important in thinking about how Muslims and how Islamicate cultures thought about the the occult sciences right thank you for mentioning that and we will be talking more about the future of identity for research I guess but what about what's in the 14 chapters can you provide us with an overview of your themes and concepts explored in the chapters of Islamicate occult sciences how does it contribute to the existing scholarship on this topic that preceded this volume and what ways does it does the book challenge or expand upon existing narrative or assumptions about Islamicate occult sciences what new perspectives or interpretations do this chapter about them sure so as I as you mentioned earlier the main idea of the book was to combine the perspectives of intellectual history manuscript studies and material culture so one part of the book is dedicated to historical studies and the second part is dedicated to material culture and there's different concerns in these parts represented by different chapters for example there is concern with the epistemology of magic and so Charles Burnett's discussion of the tripartite division of magic into talismans, neurologism, alchemy aims to show that magic in particular is conceived as the alternate practice of wisdom you have also the chapter by Michael Noble and his discussion of Fakhlidin al-Razi and his philosophizing of magic and its function as what he brilliantly calls soteriological and guillomorphosis I hope I said that correctly but also you have another contribution by Noah Gardner and his discussion of Al-Bistamis and his cosmological letters discourse and and and universalism so and these come from from different different perspectives but they're all dealing with the epistemology of the occult sciences but also some texts of our new understandings of new works or new readings of new works or new manuscripts and that's for example my contribution on the Huanistapha 52nd episode looking at magic in light of a wide range of manuscripts to this also belongs Maria Satellini's contribution which analyzes Kema Dint Kashifis's study asrati tasimi which is a timurid manual that presents the occult sciences so she offers a new reading to this text showing basically how it transcends conventional notions of confessionalism and astricts for me she divide you also have contributions that deal with the history of specific practices and here I'm thinking of Bill Bint-Hollum's contribution on the magic squares which is the most up-to-date and exhaustive I think history of magic squares in the Islamicate context the second part is called occult technologies from instruction to action and we sought with this one to soften the bifurcation between intellectual history and material culture by combining discussion of manuals and discussion of practices and their material outcomes together so in the same in this second part on occult technologies we have for example the contribution by Jean-Jacques Coulomb who writes about Kitab al-Shalas Ima-Hindia which he basically rescued from scholarly obscurity and it is a kind of manual of practice so it contains scripts it describes the occult technologies so it felt that that is a good place for such an article to be placed in order to soften that bifurcation between intellectual history and material culture also Matthew Malvin-Kushki's chapter entitled Letters Call for the Conquest of Cairo and the Development of Ottoman Occult Scientific Imperialism looking at the work particularly of Kemal Prasada this looks at the as Letters as Occult technology that is mobilized in Ottoman imperialism and the conquest of Cairo as a title and the text elaborates on so in this way these texts are placed within the part on occult technologies these are followed by articles on objects and on artifacts for example Maria Mertiard and Rachel Parrich take this the idea that Matthew Malvin-Kushki presented and embody it in discussing talismans in the battlefield which is really their follow-up on an exhibition at the at the Met Metropolitan Museum in New York that is entitled I think Power and Piety Islamic talismans on the battlefield and I think it's a 2017 or 2016 exhibition and then from this article then Farukia takes us to the south to south east Asia and the Caligrams of Ali that are pretty much you know occult technological telegrams and finally Christian Gruber looks at amulets in in modern Turkey so this part really is it really intervenes in putting together texts that describe occult technologies and objects and artifacts that represent the occult sciences as technologies yeah that's great thank you for this synthesis and distilling some of their contributions and the book is our 700 pages so I would have studied this and enjoy this chapter on its own and really switch in details and facts and sources that someone can pick up on and expand on the existing scholarship so in your chapter you've mentioned that you've worked on who are known as brother impurity or if one of so far and scholars have noticed that the writings of the occult are less studied as compared to the other writings so in your own research resources did you lay on to explore the theory and practice of Islamic critical sciences and how did you navigate the challenges of accessing both as physical access but also as conceptual access and interpreting these sources yeah I mean one of the most exciting things about the field of the study of Islamic ethical sciences is that there's a wealth of manuscripts that are untouched that await to be studied and understood and translated and edited and so the first challenge is really drawing the line on the kind of texts that a scholar wants to approach knowing that there is much more you have to be tapped into that could even change the way we think about our own material so looking at archives and looking at library catalogs is always an exciting place to to to start and so yeah at least for me that's where I go first but also sorry I do utilize bio-biographic sources to to understand the way that the occult sciences were positioned in in in Islamic cultures but also in different levels of society how are people constructing ideas about the the occult or even like the history of of the occult how did people construct that from the point of view of of of a medieval author for example so I think this this always is helpful to contextualize of course so yeah but also the the real challenge is keeping up now because there's a huge amount of scholarship that is currently expanding our knowledge whether it was by highlighting new texts that were discovered or new approaches to the occult sciences or simply a new geographical context explorer that were ignored in in in the past and even not represented in Alvarion for example the West African context and here I'm also thinking of the work of Ariela Marcus cells and and Olamino Ogunica who are looking at isoterrorism and the occult sciences in in the West African context and so you know it's it's it's an excellent time to be a scholar of the occult sciences but yeah you have to keep up with with with an explosion of amazing scholarship there's also real challenges though and these challenges basically I think one one aspect is taking theoretical and methodological stances that are critical of past approaches also it means also looking at the material to construct historical trends while you know at the same time being overwhelmed by the amount of manuscripts that you know we tell new stories and and and change our approaches so that's one challenge but I think the the the bigger challenge is to establish within Islamic studies the Islamic isoterrorism and the occult sciences as as central and and the challenge remains is really to push it even further the the true historical significance of Islamic conceptualization of the rafi or the rib the or the strange but also the button so this this this has to do with the way you know we we we we teach about Islam and also how Islamic studies of courses are constructed and so and and and a challenge that we must mention is the funding you know going to look at manuscripts and travel to different places to begin to talk about occult sciences in in in different islamicate cultures globally that requires funding and so as every academic knows there isn't much of that to help facilitate so you know so this is a major challenge that we have to face right and this move us from the past to the present so what are some of the contemporary implications or applications of Islamic it called sciences discussed in the book how do these practices continue to influence and shape various aspects of muslim societies today so I mean if you look at the way the occult sciences are practiced nowadays I think to a large degree it's less visible than even historical practices so studying them is not easy studying contemporary practices are not easy because of this aspect because of the nature of like how they go a bit underground the negative attitudes about called knowledge and so I think we need much much more research that tackles contemporary practices and current applications of the occult sciences but you can say generally speaking that the kind of practices that do exist are less of the astral magic type so less the right and acting less not embedded necessarily in natural philosophical Aristotelian near platonic foundations like we have in the early medieval period but it's more literist for sure and so here we can talk about two contexts we can look at how literist practices are incorporated within contemporary Sufi context and that's definitely worth studying a little bit more but they do manifest now in interesting way in less restricted communities so I think of huge consequences to the formation of contemporary magical practices is the influence of the corpus attributed to Hamad al-Booni and you know Hamad al-Booni was himself he himself talks about the science of letters and develops it within very clear Sufi cosmological frameworks but you know at some point these these practices let us practice as Noah Gardner argues in his works and his species yet de-isotericized so you can have a list of techniques and powerful correspondences lots of description of correspondences between days hours planets stones angels gin letters divine etc and so and and and now you no longer need to be part of a Sufi community or some kind of elite the practices get a little bit more quote unquote democratized there is less soul work as well so they become more solitary practices and and and I'm talking still about the contemporary context or like the de-isotericization of al-Booni type of magic which is literist is encapsulated you know in the very popular but controversial grimoire penned in the 20th century by enigmatic characters like the Egyptian and Seidel Horsenian Feliki and also Abdiphatha Hottori also from from Egypt and they clearly basically created a whole mode of practice that is solitary and user-friendly and simplifying a lot of the material that can get very complicated in in electro-context but it's also I think worth mentioning that you know the practices of the occult sciences in different Islamic contexts in it should be studied in the context of globalization and the impact of western occult and esoteric currents on it like spiritualism and and the new age and so we see that the the language of magical agency is also changing when you read or you listen to people talking about magic even online or on social media so people are talking or some people are talking less about gin and more about energies and and and I find that really really interesting and this is of course studied by Alizad Dustar in his book on the Iranian Metaphysicals in the context of Iran specifically in the 1990s if I remember correctly so more research like this would be I think very illuminating and bridging a gap that we do have about studying new cult sciences in the contemporary context.
Right and I was also thinking about not just this practice but also representation and manifestation let's say about culture and novels and semantic production so the cult continues really to occupy the imagination of so many communities not just you know in the west well so in the Islamic world. Of course I mean you you still see it in in you know occult horror films right whether it was in in in whether it was Egyptian occult horror films like Adali where there's a scene of contacting a spirit of the child who's like causing lots of havoc and or even the film in swell well gin as well that features talismans and occult practices you know there's this it's the gin and still form an important aspect of Muslim culture you know stories about gin full core about gin so it is it is spot and parcel of the imagination for sure right moving from the present to the future how do you envision the work contributing to future research and discussions on Islamic ethical sciences and let me ask you this hypothetical question if you had an open budget and was asked to organize a conference on the equal sciences what would you like it to focus on okay now that's that's that's a good question so like if I if I have an open budget to do to do this again you mean I will definitely be more global definitely be more global you know the south Asian and African context that need to be definitely represented better but also I I would have more contemporary context represented as well which is what we were talking about earlier also I think looking at the occult science is through the lens of gender studies and critical race theories and here I'm also thinking about the work of Taylor Moore at the University of California who works on the occult sciences in modern Egypt from the perspective of critical race theories gender and and decolonial materiality so definitely exciting things already already happening that I think would like to center in the conversation about the occult sciences but also look at more alchemy and more divination the volume in our conference ended up focusing more on magic than than a magic in astrology to even to some degree but alchemy and divination I think need more representation but especially divination we talk a bit about gmnc we but a little bit about physiognomy but I think much more can be done about divination also I from a very personal interest I would love to talk more about the narratives of danger that's around occult sciences for example you mentioned earlier in popular culture the occult sciences is is is very widespread and also in in in there's entertaining aspect of the occult sciences that I would like to work on some more and that's not just the text themselves and how pretty they are and how entertaining the the language can be in the description can be but also those narratives of danger about texts like El Booni, Shams, and Mahal Kubra you know the ones I'm talking about you know like if you have a copy of it in your house you're risking unleashing legions of gin on your family, la sama halal law or these kind of narratives I would really like to talk more about that so so that would involve looking at more Arabic or culture for example and beyond as or looking at circulation of manuscripts and and and the underground of that circulation I think would be a very interesting aspect to to include in a next conference for our next 800 page volume what it sounds like is that every discipline could have a contribution actually to the study of vehicle sciences and that's really speaks about the richness and the endless possibilities once you know you open the spandor box I guess well we've taken a lot of your time and traditionally we ask the authors to talk about their current and future projects if you would like to say something about that and also the room will have that you're working on the pictures so please update us on that as well sure so yeah I'm working on a lot of things but I think the things that I'm focused on more right now is definitely working on the English translation of Ra'eth Hakeim known in the Latin world as the Picatrix I am fully aware of how late I am in producing a manuscript but I hope to be excused by the fact that this was caused by collating manuscripts I have gathered more manuscripts than the original edition of Helmut Ritter and I thought it would be very important to collate as many manuscripts as possible and so that ended up taking a lot of time and but but I have I have a manuscript that I need to edit and work on so we're moving forward with that I'm also paying a lot of attention to a corpus that is now dear to my heart and that is the Sudo-Arstitid in Hermetica ninth century fascinating text that offer things like alternative cosmologies alternative stories to Genesis even and a story about the Demi-Erg and the the divine origins of the occult sciences and these are in Arabic so I am I'm looking at them closely and I hope to put together a project to study those and also I'm working on the Jabbadiy and Corpus but particularly looking at magic in the Jabbadiy and Corpus focusing on a text known as Kitab and Nuhrab which is a completely understudied text but very influential on text like the Ra'eth Hakeim so yeah this is these are the main project research projects that I have yeah we will be looking forward to them and hopefully having you again on the podcast to talk about it and thank you for the listeners and to you for listening to today's episode in which we explored Islamic