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I am grateful to Hussein Ali Agrama, Asad Ahmed, Dan Arnold, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Steve Caton, Sarah Hammerschlag, Smita Lahiri, Bruce Lincoln, Elham Mireshghi, Margaret Mitchell, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Noah Salomon, Daniel Stolz, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article. All translations from Persian are my own.
INTRODUCTION
Iranians today largely take the legitimacy and prestige of the modern empirical sciences for granted. This prestige is a historical achievement, the effect of decades, if not centuries, of human effort. Its history is not one of linear intellectual progress, a cumulative triumph of reason over superstition or truth over error. Instead, it is a story of convergences and divergences among many different kinds of practice over a long stretch of time and in the face of myriad forms of resistance and contestation. These practices have included small-scale acts of discourse--translation and instruction, oral and textual disputation, learned exchange and popular entertainment--but also large-scale biopolitical projects involving hygiene, eugenics, psychiatry, pedagogy, and so on. They have been implicated in the rise of new classes of professionals such as scientists, engineers, technicians, bureaucrats, and educators, and in the building of new institutions and the undermining of old ones. No less important is that these practices have been deeply entangled with the state's powers of legislation, disciplining, and coercion.1
Just as the history of the rise of modern science cannot be reduced to a tale of unilinear progress, so the actors involved should not be caricatured as secular progressive modernists battling reactionary traditionists. For one thing, commitment to Islamic tradition has translated to a spectrum of attitudes toward modern science, including enthusiastic adoption and appropriation.2Scholars have noted the myriad ways in which Muslim activists and intellectuals in Iran and elsewhere have drawn on modern scientific knowledge and notions of rationality and progress in order to accomplish a variety of objectives: countering charges of reaction and superstition, attacking materialist, secularist, and heterodox religious doctrines, and criticizing the conditions of Muslim communities with the aim of advancing alternative agendas for reform.3
While many "traditionists" over the past century have embraced modern science, many of the Iranian proponents of science typically imagined as "secularists" have been committed to explicitly religious projects. Scholarship about the...