Justin Stearns

Justin Stearns is Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. His first book was a comparative intellectual history of Muslim and Christian understanding of contagion, especially in the context of the plague, entitled Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). His book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco, entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Early Modern Morocco (Cambridge University Press), was published in 2021, and the first volume of his edition and translation of al-Yusi’s (d. 1102/1691) Discourses appeared with the Library of Arabic Literature in 2020. This year he working on a biography of al-Hasan al-Yusi (d. 1691), who authored works in the fields of theology, jurisprudence, logic, and literature, and who wrote two famous public letters to the powerful ‘Alawite sultan Moulay Isma’il (d. 1727), criticizing him for the excesses of his policies. This biography will provide the reader with an introduction and overview of the intellectual, cultural, and social dimensions of early modern Morocco though the career of its most important writer.