Apr 22, 2026
Persianate Pythagorean Computing, Early Modern AI and the Imperial Panopticon: From the Safavid World of Geomancy to the Mughal Principles of Guidance
- 15:00 to 16:30
- Colloquium
- Max Planck Research Group (ASTRA)
- Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Abstract
Much like current AI, the historiography of computing is curiously amnesiac and hallucinatory. Most specialists assume this Hermetic binary science to be a very recent, exclusively Euro-American and Cold War affair; those who hold up Leibniz (d. 1716) as modern computing’s father are at pains to abstract him from his actual socio-intellectual context, whereby the “last Platonist” could only have been distantly inspired by the Chinese I Ching—certainly never the peculiarly Afro-Islamic technology of geomancy. Soul of applied Pythagoreanism throughout early modern Afro-Eurasia and obviously Leibniz’s proximate Latinate source, its considerably more sophisticated post-Mongol formulations made that “sand science” (ʿilm al-raml) a primary technology of Persianate empire, indeed the OG Artificial Cosmic Intelligence and imperial Panopticon.
This paper presents as historiographical control two of the most watershed geomantic manuals in the Greater Western tradition: Shāh Mullā Munajjim-i Shīrāzī’s World of Geomancy (Jahān al-raml) of 1576, written for Safavid state purposes; and his star student Hidāyat Allāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī’s even more comprehensive Principles of Guidance (Qavāʿid al-hidāya) of 1593, dedicated to the Mughal World Emperor Akbar himself. Naturally still unedited and unstudied for the crime of being written in post-Mongol Persian, such imperially explicit Panopticonic Sand-Scientific works are not just of outsize importance for the early modern history of science, technology, and empire generally and computing specifically; understanding their geomantic genealogy may help us to better sociopolitically, epistemologically, and ecologically navigate our own Silicon Oracles today, lest they be world-wrecking.
Biography
Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book through the lens of the Islamic Weird. His forthcoming books include Persian Pythagoreanism, Imperial Occultism and Mathematical-Linguistic Science in the Timurid Renaissance: The Lettrist Treatises of Ibn Turka and The Occult Science of Empire in Early Modern Iran: Four Persian Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic, and he is co-editor of the volumes Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (2017) and Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (2021). President of Societas Magica, he is also co-PI of the ERC Synergy project MOSAIC: Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures (2025-2031).
Contact and Registration
We welcome both internal and external guests. Registration is only required for in-person attendance. For more information about the colloquium series, please contact Jean Arzoumanov. Please note the later start time at 15:00 CET.
Zoom link: https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/63767435011?pwd=oFXYIniUuTLZb3fQ3eDLbczRmIBqx5.1
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About This Series
Over the last decade, a wave of new research has revitalized the study of Islamicate scientific traditions, particularly in the field of the so-called "occult sciences". This work has challenged the long-standing dichotomy between doctrines historically dismissed as non-rational or superstitious and the canonized sciences retrospectively framed as precursors to Western modernity.
Similarly, contrary to the perception of a stagnant precolonial scientific landscape, South Asian societies were permeated with sophisticated scientific doctrines and long-established methods of healing and prognostication. Scientific practices —including those that might be categorized as "occult" within an Islamicate framework— flourished in both elite and popular contexts. Cosmopolitan Hindu pandits and Muslim scholars practiced these sciences in royal courts, while vernacular traditions ensured their diffusion amongst broader populations. Alongside the crucial work of manuscript-based research, the persistence and vitality of non-Western scientific practices in contemporary South Asia has enabled comparative approaches combining rigorous textual philology with ethnographic insight.
This colloquium series seeks to highlight some of the most recent contributions to the field and to open critical perspectives on the intellectual and practical life of science in the subcontinent. Invited speakers will explore the concrete practice of South Asian sciences across the early modern and modern periods, examining their position within the Arabo-Persian and Sanskritic knowledge systems.