Guest Lecutre by Sally P. Ragep (m.Ed.) and Prof. Dr. F. Jamil Rageb (McGill University, Montréal).
Like Brigadoon, a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every hundred years, the “Maragha School” has, for the most part, been portrayed as a series of discrete episodes. Spanning some five centuries over several continents and cultural regions, the School is mostly characterized by individual scientists or brief, courtly patronage, the foremost manifestation of which is the Maragha observatory of the Īlkhānids, which has served as the School’s central pendant.
The talk problematizes this characterization by asking what a school, or scholarly tradition, means in an Islamic context, and the relation of this conceptual construct to the actual physical schools and institutions of Islam. By seeking to understand the continuity of learning in Islam that would, for example, see astronomy transmitted continuously over 50 generations, Rageb & Rageb will offer an alternative to historical accounts that represent Islamic scientific learning and innovation as inexorably and exclusively tied to individuals, courts, and enlightened rulers.