Support The World's Smartest Network
×

Help the New York Academy of Sciences bring late-breaking scientific information about the COVID-19 pandemic to global audiences. Please make a tax-deductible gift today.

DONATE
This site uses cookies.
Learn more.

×

This website uses cookies. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate while others offer you a better browsing experience. You give us your permission to use cookies, by continuing to use our website after you have received the cookie notification. To find out more about cookies on this website and how to change your cookie settings, see our Privacy policy and Terms of Use.

We encourage you to learn more about cookies on our site in our Privacy policy and Terms of Use.

Golden Ages in the History of Science

FREE

for Members

Golden Ages in the History of Science

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Columbia University, 500 W 120th St, Mudd Building, Room 520
Far from a categorical support of either religious scepticism (i.e. a ‘secular’ worldview), on the one hand, or religious traditionalism-cum-fundamentalism (i.e. a ‘creationist’ one) on the other, public debates over Darwin in Arabic led to a revivification in theological and hermeneutical questions around issues of exegesis and epistemology. In the case of the former, they spurred renewed arguments about the status of human reason in relation to scriptural hermeneutics; in the latter, over the nature of evidence, certainty and doubt. As such, the recasting of traditional systems of religious knowledge was involved in the very ways in which scientific claims were themselves assessed, and in the process, transforming the meaning and discursive reach of the former as much as the latter. This talk will examine one of the earliest exegetical responses to modern evolutionary theories to explore these issues before charting in broad outline the subsequent transformation of Muslim responses to Darwin in more recent times.

Speaker

Marwa Elshakry

Columbia University

Marwa Elshakry is Associate Professor of History at Columbia, currently completing her manuscript, Theologies of Nature: Reading Darwin in the Middle East, 1860-1950.