'Stearns exhibits a scholarly mastery over the subject of natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco with each section illuminating a dark spot in the history of science.' Usman Butt, The New Arab 'This work represents a great advance in historical as well as sociological and anthropological approaches of natural sciences in Islamicate societies and opens up large perspectives for work by historians, naturalists and philologists.' Meyssa Ben Saad, Metascience '[ This book] provides a window onto the 'long Moroccan seventeenth century', a vanished Islamic intellectual world of integrated natural sciences, religion, and magic. The book is quietly Herculean in labor. Stearns successfully navigates between the Scylla of Salafism and the Charybdis of modernist scientific thinking to bring us a new ocean of discovery, one true to the original Moroccan sources.' Ellen Amster, Isis