LAUSR

It is worth recalling that the introduction of print technology to the Middle East and its gradual, wider adoption over the course of the nineteenth century did not bring the region’s rich manuscript culture to an immediate end. Although manuscripts written in diverse fields of learning were still widely copied and circulated at the turn of the twentieth century, they rarely appear in the bibliographies of modern Middle East historians. A notable exception and timely intervention to this tendency in modern historiography is Daniel Stolz’s book on the history of astral sciences in late Ottoman Egypt, which skillfully demonstrates, among many other things, how “‘the age of steam and print’ was also an age of manuscripts and sundials” (27). Deploying a wide array of manuscripts concerning astral knowledge is not the sole merit of Stolz’s book. In fact, manuscripts constitute only a small portion of its impressive gallery of primary sources, which include substantial archival evidence from a host of institutions such as the Egyptian National Archives and L’Observatoire de Paris, as well as an extensive list of journals, newspapers, and other print materials. Stolz masterfully brings together this diverse body of materials to tell the multilayered stories of the many actors, institutions, and textual traditions that emanated from different, yet coexisting, social realms of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Egypt. The book consists of three main sections divided into seven chapters. The first part introduces two different types of astral knowledge practiced in distinct social milieus of late Ottoman Egypt. Chapter 1 explores, through the life and relevant works of the Azhari scholar Muhammad al-Khudari, the particular type of astral knowledge that Stolz defines as “scholarly astronomy.” Practiced by ʿulama interested in pursuing the centuries-old MESA R o M E S 53 2 2019