Professor Ahmed Ragab's New Book: Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh

December 18, 2018
Ahmed RagabProfessor Ahmed Ragab, Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School and Alwaleed Program Steering Committee Member, has released a new book entitled, Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh: al-Damanhūrī's 'Clear Statement' on Anatomy. In this latest work, he examines a manual on anatomy by al-Damanhūrī (d. 1778), a late 18th-century rector of al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, entitled "The Clear Statement on the Science of Anatomy (al-qawl al-ṣarīḥ fī ʿilm al-tashrīḥ). Although al-Damanhūrī's works survive, they have yet to be studied and published. Professor Ragab therefore provides a much-needed translation of this work as well as an analysis of the author's intellectual background and that of his contemporaries in the context of late Ottoman history. Profssor Ragab provides an important contribution to scholarship on the intersection of medical and religious knowledge in late Ottoman Egypt, adding to his numerous other publications on the history of medicine and religion in the post-Classical Islamic world.