SCIENCE, TIME, AND THE ʿULAMAʾ

The importance of the ʿulamaʾ in the history of modernity has recently seen a surge of interest.Footnote ⁷ Historians and other scholars of Islam long emphasized ways in which new forms of education, the expansion of literacy, mass communication, and increasing state regulation of religion enabled other kinds of actors to “speak for Islam.”Footnote ⁸ From this perspective, ʿulamaʾ receded into the background. Recent work, by contrast, has drawn attention to the role of ʿulamaʾ in shaping modern Islamic debates and movements. Studies in this vein have shown that some of the very characteristics of modernity thought to have undermined the authority of ʿulamaʾ have in fact allowed them to exercise authority in new ways.Footnote ⁹

Despite such attention to the importance of ʿulamaʾ and their traditions of scholarship in modernity, the scientific activity of ʿulamaʾ since the 18th century has barely been studied.Footnote ¹⁰ This neglect is due in part to the continued salience of historiographical assumptions about “the decline of Islamic science,” despite the numerous and penetrating critiques to which this model has been subject.Footnote ¹¹ Meanwhile, the growing number of studies that have vastly improved our understanding of the history of science in the modern Middle East have tended to focus on those who learned science in Europe, in the new academies of the late Ottoman Empire, in missionary schools, or in newspapers and journals, and who debated science in the press—many of them important Muslim intellectuals, but rarely ones who had training in Islamic scientific traditions such as mīqāt.Footnote ¹² By contrast, the manuals and tables examined in this article were recorded only in manuscripts (even in the 19th century), and they reveal a world of informal interaction among scholars of astronomical timekeeping, their students, and consumers.

Based on such sources, this article adds a dimension to the rich portrait of Ottoman and late Ottoman temporality that has emerged in recent years. Historians working on Egypt, Beirut, and Istanbul have all, in different ways, critiqued the old notion of mechanical timekeeping as the harbinger of a single, modern temporality.Footnote ¹³ Avner Wishnitzer, for example, has explored the politics of temporality in the late Ottoman period, when different timekeeping conventions became markers of class and cultural identity.Footnote ¹⁴ Such work builds on a generation of scholarship that has moved away from E.P. Thompson's famous distinction between preindustrial “task-orientation” and industrial “time-discipline,”Footnote ¹⁵ and points instead to the existence of “multiple times” in modernity. The experience of time varies across and within societies according to differences in class, gender, and urbanization, for example.Footnote ¹⁶ In the case of Cairo, the emergence of such distinctive experiences of time entailed a good deal of technical work, in which ʿulamaʾ played a vital role.

THE MECHANICAL TIMEPIECE IN OTTOMAN CAIRO: MATERIAL FASHION AND SCHOLARLY PREOCCUPATION

The earliest evidence for the widespread use of mechanical timepieces in Egypt dates to early in the year 1737, when ʿAbd al-Latif al-Dimashqi composed his short handbook, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab.Footnote ¹⁷ Al-Dimashqi observed that “these watches (sāʿāt) have spread, and are tucked in most people's collars” (fī juyūb ghālib al-nās qad ḥushirat).Footnote ¹⁸ Although al-Dimashqi was born in Damascus, he spent most of his life in Cairo,Footnote ¹⁹ and he included in the handbook a table of values calculated for the latitude of Cairo. We can hardly doubt, therefore, that he had in mind inhabitants of Cairo (possibly along with other parts of the Ottoman Empire) when he wrote of “most people.” In this section, I examine the dynamic contexts of material and intellectual culture in 18th-century Cairo that gave rise to handbooks such as al-Dimashqi's al-Manhaj al-Aqrab.

Although historians have not examined the use of mechanical timepieces in Egypt prior to the late 19th century,Footnote ²⁰ Ottoman, Mediterranean, and global pathways of trade and travel brought mechanical timepieces into the hands of both scholarly and political elites in Cairo in a significantly earlier period. In Istanbul, European ambassadors had been bringing clocks as gifts to the Ottoman Court, often accompanied by clockmakers to maintain them, since at least the 16th century.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, the mechanical devices were so popular at court that it became almost de rigueur for diplomats to bring a trove of them to distribute as gifts.Footnote ²² By the 18th century, European travelers were bringing clocks across the Mediterranean for scientific purposes, particularly astronomical observation.Footnote ²³ Ottoman scholars and craftsmen also produced mechanical timepieces. Taqi al-Din ibn Maʿruf famously composed a treatise on the construction of mechanical clocks, which he used in the short-lived Ottoman observatory of the 1570s.Footnote ²⁴ However, although domestic production of clocks and watches continued, most of the devices in use throughout the Ottoman period were imported.Footnote ²⁵ In the 18th century, a small number of English clockmakers dominated the trade, selling, according to a French consul in Greece at the end of the century, over 12,000 watches annually in Ottoman locales around the Mediterranean, including Salonica, Istanbul, the Syrian lands, and Egypt.Footnote ²⁶ The most popular maker of watches for the Ottoman market, the Englishman George Prior, exported more than 40,000 of them before his death in approximately 1815. (This figure excludes the numerous watches produced by less reputable manufacturers who put his name on their work.)Footnote ²⁷ Prior is said to have remarked that “the streets of the Turkish cities must be all paved with English watches.”Footnote ²⁸

Studies of 18th-century Cairene society point to a relatively large potential audience for such a fashionable object—and for manuals on how to use it. Nelly Hanna has argued for the existence of a thriving, “middle-class” literary culture in 18th-century Cairo, among a growing number of people who were educated but not necessarily scholars.Footnote ²⁹ Jane Murphy has shown that scientific circles, connecting Arabophone scholars with patrons among the Ottoman and Mamluk elite, were an important element of this milieu.Footnote ³⁰ And Khaled El-Rouayheb has recently argued that this period saw a “florescence” of rigorous scholarly activity, especially in logic, for which one 18th-century observer noted an “inordinate enthusiasm” among scholars in Egypt.Footnote ³¹ It is noteworthy that the year 1737, when al-Dimashqi authored his handbook, is known to have been a time of economic and cultural recovery from a period of hardship earlier in the 1730s.Footnote ³² We should understand the writing of texts on “the position of the watch hand” not as a phenomenon isolated within the intellectual history of a scholarly elite, but as part of this broader cultural, economic, and social context.

Mechanical timepieces, though not found literally in “most people's” collars, as al-Dimashqi wrote, were certainly present beyond the upper crust of 18th-century Cairene society. We are not dealing only with people who could afford clocks such as the Swiss piece by Berthout that French savants seized from an abandoned Mamluk palace at the end of the century.Footnote ³³ Thus, for example, a 1781 copy of al-Dimashqi's handbook was written and owned by one “Mahmud, clerk in the office of the Volunteers, son of the late Sulayman Effendi, son of the late ʿAbd al-Rahman Effendi, son of the late Mustafa Effendi.”Footnote ³⁴ The genealogy, along with the position of clerk (khalīfe), indicates membership in a certain kind of elite, namely the Ottoman bureaucracy (as opposed to a Mamluk household).Footnote ³⁵ However, the Volunteers (gönüllüyān) were several rungs down on the Ottoman military ladder; appointment to their office likely did not bring the highest level of prestige.Footnote ³⁶ The passing of al-Dimashqi's work through the hands of someone such as Mahmud suggests that mechanical timekeeping was only “elite” in a relatively broad sense—not the domain of one or two beys with expensive tastes, but of the significant number of people in 18th-century Cairo who possessed a certain degree of education and means. Given the sheer volume of clocks and watches imported, this relatively broad class of consumers makes sense.

The use of timepieces was also a part of the material culture of ʿulamaʾ specifically. As Hanna has described, many scholars in 18th-century Cairo practiced trades (even giving lessons in their shops), while others married into families of craftsmen.Footnote ³⁷ The world of books was intertwined with the world of crafts and commerce. Thus, it should come as little surprise that the well-known polymath Hasan al-Jabarti (d. 1774) had at least two acquaintances known as al-sāʿatjī (Tur. saatçi), “the horologist.” And the famous chronicles of his son, ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, describe a mid-18th-century scholar named Husayn al-Mahalli who “had a shop near the gate of al-Azhar, where he would make money by selling clocks (manākīb) for knowing times (li-maʿrifat al-awqāt).”Footnote ³⁸

It is true that historians have generally understood al-Jabarti's manākīb to mean “almanacs,” but this is apparently a contextual guess, with no basis in the etymology of the word.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, al-Mahalli was selling clocks, not books. ʿAli Mubarak's voluminous geographical dictionary, al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida (published in the 1880s), quotes al-Jabarti's passage about al-Mahalli with a different pluralization of the strange term: instead of manākīb, Mubarak uses minkābāt.Footnote ⁴⁰ The latter is a well-attested corruption of the term bankāmāt (sing. bankām),Footnote ⁴¹ which was used in Arabic to denote water clocks since at least the 12th century (from the Persian bingān, or pingān, both of which denote either a bowl or clepsydra).Footnote ⁴² Closer to al-Jabarti and al-Mahalli's milieu, early 19th-century mīqāt texts from Egypt employ the term manākib (very close to al-Jabarti's manākīb) in technical contexts where they can only refer to clocks.Footnote ⁴³

To be clear, while the terms manākib, manākīb, and minkābāt all referred to clocks, they were not all mechanical, even in the 18th and 19th centuries. And texts “on the position of the watch hand” generally used sāʿa, which is the modern term.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nevertheless, the history of the older term minkāb (and its variants) highlights the dynamism of Ottoman timekeeping's material culture, and the many ways in which ʿulamaʾ participated in that culture. As noted, the word's etymology evokes the water clock. In the 16th century, however, Taqi al-Din used bankāmāt to denote all kinds of clocks, including his mechanical devices. Muddying the waters, a 17th-century lexicon records that “timekeepers” (ahl al-tawqīt) use the term bankāmāt specifically for sand clocks.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the same period, the Ottoman encyclopedia Kashf al-Zunun ʿan Asami al-Kutub wa-l-Funun (The Removal of Doubt from the Names of Books and Sciences) largely paraphrases Taqi al-Din's 16th-century discussion in using bankāmāt to denote all kinds of timepieces, and expresses a preference for the mechanical or “wheeled” type.Footnote ⁴⁶ And al-Jabarti himself used another variant, minkāmāt, when remarking on clocks—probably mechanical pieces—brought to Egypt by the savants of the French invasion.Footnote ⁴⁷

Manuals and tables on positioning the watch hand should thus be read in part as emerging out of a long history of various modes of interaction between ʿulamaʾ and diverse timekeeping devices, as well as in light of the spread of the new, mechanical variety across a certain range of the urban population. In 18th-century Cairo, ʿulamaʾ sold clocks in front of al-Azhar, used them in the practice of astronomy, and examined them with curiosity during the French invasion. Were it not for the notion that Muslim scholars had, by this period, long ceased to possess a dynamic scientific tradition, it would hardly be surprising that certain ʿulamaʾ also offered instruction on the correct way of using them.

The scholars who offered such instruction came to Cairo from several parts of the Ottoman Empire. Al-Dimashqi, as has been mentioned, was from Damascus. Al-Khawaniki and al-ʿAzzazi were from villages in the Nile Delta.Footnote ⁴⁸ Al-Nabuli was from a town near Tunis. All, however, had come to Cairo because of the appeal of the al-Azhar mosque, where they studied and eventually taught in the diverse fields of knowledge that characterized the learning of an ʿālim.Footnote ⁴⁹ Some of these ʿulamaʾ were known primarily for their astronomical knowledge. Al-Khawaniki, a student of the prominent astronomer Ridwan Effendi, produced numerous works on different kinds of timekeeping instruments as well as the prediction of eclipses and planetary positions.Footnote ⁵⁰ Others, however, had broader reputations. Al-Dimashqi was renowned as “a believer consistent in religion, worship, and probity.”Footnote ⁵¹ While regarded as an authority on astronomy (al-falak wa-l-hayʾa), he also taught students of law (fiqh). He was the shaykh of the Syrian pavilion (riwāq) at al-Azhar before he took an ascetic turn, growing long hair, performing the hajj annually, and limiting his social contact.Footnote ⁵²

The textual history of al-Dimashqi and al-Khawaniki's works suggests that they remained in demand among similarly trained scholars through the 18th and 19th centuries. Al-Manhaj al-Aqrab, for example, exists in at least ten manuscript copies in addition to the 1737 autograph, several of which include a copy of al-Khawaniki's tables.Footnote ⁵³ The colophon dates of these copies cover a range of decades into the 19th century. Nine of them are in Egyptian libraries; the tenth was probably acquired in Egypt before entering the collection of the University of Michigan.Footnote ⁵⁴ Other than Mahmud of the bāb-ı gönüllüyān, the known copyists include Shaykh ʿUthman al-Wardani (1796–97), Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Sharbatli (1833–34), and Ridwan b. Muhammad b. Sulayman (1856).Footnote ⁵⁵ Al-Wardani and al-Sharbatli were also involved in the copying of older astronomical texts (from the 15th and 17th centuries, respectively).Footnote ⁵⁶ Al-Wardani wrote his own works on various aspects of mīqāt, including almanacs, and had at least one student who did the same in the early 19th century.Footnote ⁵⁷ The most prominent of these copyists, however, was Ridwan b. Muhammad, who was best known for his knowledge of variant Qurʾan readings (qirāʾāt).Footnote ⁵⁸

In other words, the genre of manuals and tables on “the position of the watch hand” did not emerge—whether in its material or its intellectual context—from the milieu of the new scientific institutions established in Istanbul beginning in the late 18th century and in Egypt beginning in the early 19th century.Footnote ⁵⁹ Neither the presence of the timepieces nor the knowledge of how to use them was a consequence of the French invasion, the nizam-i cedid, or the explicitly modernizing initiatives of Mehmed Ali Pasha and his successors. Mechanical timepieces were a longstanding feature of the material culture of Ottoman Cairo. Whether imported commercially, received as diplomatic gifts, or produced domestically, they began to appear in the elite and educated circles of the city no later than the 1730s. The growth of a literature on how to use these new objects was the work of ʿulamaʾ for whom the correct practice of timekeeping existed within an older milieu of scholarship that included astronomical knowledge alongside the study of law, the Qurʾan, and other fields. At the intersection of these material and intellectual contexts, people in Cairo learned to use their new clocks and watches in a particular way, to which I now turn.

CORRECTING THE WATCH: MAKING OTTOMAN TIME WORK

The manuals and tables “on the position of the watch hand” are premised on the Ottoman ğurūbī sāʿat (sunset hour) method of timekeeping.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this system, sometimes also called “alaturka time,” the day begins at sunset, which is always called 12:00. Mechanical clocks and watches keep equal hours, but must be adjusted daily in order to keep 12:00 aligned with the natural movement of sunset over the course of the year. But sunset is the only natural phenomenon to which the clock is pegged in this way. Unlike the sundial, which keeps apparent solar time throughout the day, the mechanical clock on the ğurūbī sāʿat system would show one time for apparent noon in February, and quite another in July. Both times, however, would be a function of the number of equal hours since sunset. For modern readers, this synthesis of mechanical and natural rhythms may seem almost like a reversal of the clock's “intended” purpose of measuring fixed, arbitrary units of time. For Ottomans, however, it was precisely through this adaptation that mechanical timekeeping came to make sense.

E. W. Lane, the British Orientalist who lived in Egypt during the 1820s and 1830s, describes a timekeeping practice that closely resembles ğurūbī sāʿat convention:

While Lane's description of people adjusting their watches by the call of the muezzin confirms the prevalence of ğurūbī sāʿat time in Egypt, it masks a great deal of history that made the synchronization of mechanical, ritual, and natural rhythms possible. I have argued above that mechanical timekeeping in Egypt dates to the early 18th century, almost one hundred years prior to Lane's observation. In this section, a close analysis of texts that ʿulamaʾ authored “on the position of the watch hands” during that period will show how ğurūbī sāʿat timekeeping embodied an experience of temporality that was linked to the performance of specific practices by particular kinds of people.

In Istanbul, as other historians have shown, the muvakkithane, or timekeeper house, was a crucial site for the regulation of ğurūbī sāʿat timekeeping.Footnote ⁶² In this space, often attached to a mosque, the muvakkit (Ar. muwaqqit), traditionally responsible for determining the times of prayer, also assumed responsibility for maintaining accurate clock time.Footnote ⁶³ Ottoman watch users, passing by the muvakkithane, would correct their timepieces according to the ğurūbī sāʿat system. There is little evidence, however, that muvakkithanes served the same, popular role in Cairo that they did in Istanbul in this period.Footnote ⁶⁴ Manuals and tables “on the position of the watch hand” show how ʿulamaʾ facilitated the ğurūbī sāʿat use of mechanical timepieces by deploying their knowledge of astronomical timekeeping to establish a new practice—positioning the watch hand—in relation to two much older practices that were performed in Cairo not only at sunset, but throughout the day: measuring the altitude of the sun above the horizon, and listening to all five of the daily calls to prayer (adhān).

ʿAbd al-Latif al-Dimashqi's al-Manhaj al-Aqrab links the positioning of the watch hand with the first of these older practices. It enables its user to set a mechanical timepiece correctly, according to ğurūbī sāʿat time, at any moment when the sun is visible. The handbook consists of two parts: a short introduction with brief instructions, followed by a lengthy set of tables. The tables give the time, in equal hours since sunset, as a function of solar longitude (i.e., the degree of the sun on the ecliptic) and the angular altitude of the sun above the horizon. (See Figure 1 for an example of the tables.) The information incorporated into these tables was knowledge long available in Cairo, which had been a center for the elaboration of Islamic astronomical timekeeping (mīqāt) at least since the 10th-century scholar Ibn Yunus laid the foundation of the massive “Cairo Corpus” of tables.Footnote ⁶⁵ Al-Dimashqi appears to have relied on the astronomical parameters contained in this corpus to produce his own tables.Footnote ⁶⁶

FIGURE 1.

ʿAbd al-Latif al-Dimashqi, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab li-Tashih Mawqiʿ al-ʿAqrab, Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor p. 43. The user would turn to this table after observing the sky with a quadrant and finding that the sun was 18 degrees above the horizon. The top row of Zodiacal houses (Virgo-Capricorn) corresponds with the leftmost column of numbers; the second row of houses (Aries-Sagittarius) corresponds with the rightmost column of numbers. The names of the houses in the top row are written upside-down.

Al-Dimashqi says that he wrote al-Manhaj al-Aqrab at the request of a particular person, “one of the inexperienced people delving into this craft (ṣināʿa).”Footnote ⁶⁷ We can define the text's audience in more detail by considering the skills that al-Dimashqi himself specified were necessary in order to use it: measuring the altitude of the sun, and determining the degree of the sun on the ecliptic. Finding the solar altitude was a basic skill of mīqāt, for which relatively simple instruments such as the quadrant (rubʿ) would suffice. For determining the solar longitude, al-Dimashqi provides an arithmetical technique based on the correspondence between the Coptic calendar and the solar year. In other words, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab did not leave a huge amount of technical work for its users. The difficult calculation is built into the tables, for whose use al-Dimashqi provides precise instructions—everything down to the color in which he has labeled each column.

However, while al-Dimashqi's handbook does a lot for the reader, it does not do everything. In particular, the reader is left with the task of measuring the solar altitude. Al-Dimashqi stipulates that the reader will need an altitude arc (qaws al-irtifāʿ), and he suggests drawing the requisite graduated quadrant on the back of the manual itself.Footnote ⁶⁸ He assumed not only that his reader would already know how to take a solar altitude using such an arc, but also, and more remarkably, that a reader not in possession of such an instrument would be able to make one himself. Doing so would have required drawing the scale, affixing a plumb line, and fashioning two apertures for sighting.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such tactile skill could hardly have been assumed of a complete novice. (Al-Dimashqi's suggestion also offers an intriguing glimpse of an improvisational culture of instrumentation, wherein a text could be transformed into the mathematical instrument it calls for.)Footnote ⁷⁰

It is also noteworthy that al-Dimashqi arranges the tables according to a convention that saves space but adds a level of complexity. Solar longitude is measured in the standard way, by Zodiacal houses of thirty degrees each. However, instead of drawing a column for each house, he combines complementary houses into one column, which should be read top-to-bottom for one house, and bottom-to-top for the other. This common shortcut relies on the fact that the day is of equal length, for example, when the sun is in the twenty-fifth of Aries (in the spring) and the fifth of Virgo (in the fall). Such a conventional arrangement of the tables made them considerably shorter and more elegant, but assumed that readers were trained to understand them.

The overall impression is that “one of the inexperienced people delving into this craft” may not have been a master like al-Dimashqi, but he was still a student of astronomical timekeeping. It is even possible that this student was quite experienced in astronomy, and that the new “craft” into which he was delving was specifically the practice of horology. Perhaps the student who requested this manual was someone like Husayn al-Mahalli, a scholar trying to make a living in part by selling timekeeping devices. The text was not open to all who could read (already a small audience). It required knowledge and skills that would likely have been acquired through study with a master teacher such as al-Dimashqi himself. The handbook thus represents al-Dimashqi's deployment of an Islamic scholarly tradition to enable the regulation of new timekeeping devices by a larger, but still closely defined, group of people who had basic training in this tradition.

But observation of the sun was only one, relatively technical practice through which ʿulamaʾ could deploy their knowledge of mīqāt to facilitate the use of mechanical timepieces according to ğurūbī sāʿat convention. In fact, most manuals and tables did not provide the correspondence between the position of the watch hand and the altitude of the sun, but rather between the position of the watch hand and the times of prayer. Such tables, though still assuming an audience that was literate and kept track of the precise calendar date, did not require observational skill. Thus, Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Nabuli wrote his Natijat Mawqiʿ ʿAqrab al-Saʿat (for 1867–68) at the request of a vaguely defined “group” (jamāʿa), to whom he does not attribute any particular qualifications.Footnote ⁷¹

Copies of al-Dimashqi's handbook commonly include an undated Jadawil Mawqiʿ al-Saʿat ʿala Hasab Awqat al-Salawat (Tables of the Position of Watch Hands at Prayer Times) by al-Dimashqi's contemporary, Ramadan al-Khawaniki.Footnote ⁷² From a certain perspective, this pairing of texts seems unnecessary. Al-Dimashqi's handbook has its user find the solar longitude and solar altitude. The times of prayer can be determined by these data alone (for a given latitude), as was commonly done with the astrolabe or astrolabic quadrant, for example.Footnote ⁷³ Instead, users of al-Dimashqi's tables apparently translated their solar observations into a conventional time based on equal hours since sunset, and then used al-Khawaniki's tables to find the times of prayer in these conventional terms. Perhaps this procedure made sense for a muwaqqit who had to tell a muezzin when to issue the call to prayer. If the timekeeper was concerned that his watch had a rate of error, for example, he could have used al-Dimashqi's handbook to synchronize it with ğurūbī sāʿat time at any point during the day, and then determined the times of prayer simply by examining the timepiece alongside the accompanying table by al-Khawaniki.

The terminology of this new subgenre of mīqāt, however, suggests an additional use for tables such as al-Khawaniki's. Throughout these manuals and tables, the Arabic word for “time” is typically linked with that for “prayer” (e.g., awqāt al-ṣalawāt), whereas what the watch or clock displays is termed “the position of the watch hand” (mawqiʿ ʿaqrab al-sāʿa). All of the “prayer tables” in this genre, from al-Khawaniki's in the early 18th century to al-Nabuli's in the 1860s, literally concern not the time at which one should pray, but in what position the watch hand should fall when the time of prayer comes. For the times of prayer are always the same: fajr (dawn), ḍuhr (noon), ʿaṣr (afternoon), maghrib (sunset), ʿishāʾ (evening). What changes is the position of the watch hand corresponding to these times on a given day.

It is therefore uncertain whether tables like al-Khawaniki's would have been used (e.g., by a muwaqqit or muezzin) for knowing when to pray by the watch, or whether they would have been used (by a broader audience) for knowing how to set a watch by the call to prayer. They could easily have served both purposes. Lane described people in Egypt setting their watches once a day by the call to prayer at sunset. These tables enabled the same procedure for every time of prayer, not only maghrib. Thus, the “prayer table” was not necessarily, or at least not exclusively, about knowing when to pray. It was also about taking a cue from the call to prayer of the muezzin in order to set one's watch. We can read the common pairing of al-Dimashqi's and al-Khawaniki's texts not as a redundancy, but rather as a way of offering two distinct methods of knowing how to set the timepiece: one, by visual observation and measurement of the sun's position; the other, by listening for the muezzin.

FROM OBJECT INTO INSTRUMENT

As others have shown in detail, it is difficult to square ğurūbī sāʿat timekeeping with the notion that clock time is necessarily removed from the natural rhythm of the solar day.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, the specific practices enabled and illustrated by texts on “the position of the watch hand” also call into question a dichotomy, common in time studies, that opposes premodern time consciousness—which is religious or “mythical,” and therefore “vague” or “impressionistic”—with modern time, which is based on more regular, “abstract measurement.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The teaching of ʿulamaʾ on positioning the watch hand in Ottoman Cairo shows us a type of technical religious practice—the intersection of Islamic astronomical timekeeping (mīqāt) with Islamic prayer (salat)—through which the watch itself was made increasingly regular in its measurement, without the emergence of a “time” abstracted from the rhythms of ritual and celestial motion.

Indeed, the history of the “position of the watch hand” genre suggests that the very understanding of mechanical clocks and watches as instruments of precise timekeeping was only established (in Ottoman Cairo) at the nexus of mīqāt and salat. After all, although I have used the word “timepiece” as a catchall for various kinds of clocks and watches, the measurement of time is not the only way to use such an object. Clocks and watches bore multiple kinds of aesthetic and social value in Ottoman culture (as they do in 21st-century America, among other places). As Ian White and others have documented in vivid detail, European clockmakers made considerable efforts to appeal to their conception of Ottoman aesthetic standards.Footnote ⁷⁶ The roman numerals of the chapter ring were replaced with Eastern Arabic numerals. On particularly ornate pieces (such as certain clocks), figural art gave way to floral designs.Footnote ⁷⁷ An essential aspect of any watch was its casing. A three-case design was standard, with the entirety, as al-Dimashqi remarked, being tucked into the “collar” where Ottomans often carried personal effects. As late as the 1870s, a British engineer who worked on the Ottoman railways commented on the care and deliberateness with which a “Turk” would remove a watch from the many layers of clothing, bag, and case within which it rested, only to find that it was not working, or working only approximately: “so to learn the time of day within an hour or so a quarter of an hour will be wasted.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Although this account is evidently part of an essentializing discourse through which Victorians imagined the “time-mindless Oriental” in the 19th century,Footnote ⁷⁹ we can also read it as implying that watches had value apart from their utility as instruments of precise timekeeping—which is surely correct.Footnote ⁸⁰ The vogue of clocks and watches in the Ottoman court, in particular, was in large part a function of their value as objects of curiosity, art, and what White has called “power projection.”Footnote ⁸¹ According to al-Dimashqi, watches in early 18th-century Cairo came in a variety of forms and types (ikhtalafa ashkāluhā wa-anwāʿuhā), including some that only had hour hands.Footnote ⁸²

In the introduction to his manual, al-Dimashqi explained his motives by remarking that “watch hands are not free of earliness or delay.”Footnote ⁸³ But concern for earliness or delay may not have been shared by everyone with a watch in Cairo in 1737. Al-Dimashqi, along with the rest of the scholars we have encountered, was linking the object of the watch to a specific way of thinking about the measurement of time. ʿUlamaʾ who devoted themselves to the study of mīqāt were particularly committed to the value of mathematical precision and accuracy in the performance of certain practices, from the observation of the sun to the fulfillment of the duty of prayer. “Approximation is not like precision, for it contains a kind of carelessness,” wrote Muhammad al-Nabuli in the preface to his tables, which took the extraordinary measure of giving the times of prayer to the half-minute (al-taqrīb laysa ka-l-tadqīq idh fīhi nawʿ tasāhul).Footnote ⁸⁴

Of course, the many kinds of value that a clock or watch might carry—precision timepiece, art, social symbol, novelty—are not mutually exclusive. My point is that, in a context where such objects were only just coming into broad use, it should not be taken for granted that they would be used to measure time to the minute, let alone the half-minute. The manuals and tables on positioning the watch hand helped to establish that usage. And they embodied a claim that it was ʿulamaʾ who could provide, through their tradition of mīqāt, the knowledge of how to perform such measurement correctly—thereby bridging scholarly discourse, material fashion, and religious and technical practice. This phenomenon undermines a teleological understanding of the history of temporality, in which religious time is supplanted by modern time. In fact, a “modern” emphasis on precision emerged in part from a very old conception of piety, which was long cultivated among a small number of scholars but now became increasingly normative.Footnote ⁸⁵

A CANNON FIRED BY THE SUN

Manuals and tables “on the position of the watch hand” span a period, from the early 18th to the middle of the 19th century, during which the relationship of science, state, and society in the Ottoman Empire—and particularly in Egypt—underwent significant upheaval. When ʿAbd al-Latif al-Dimashqi composed the first text in Cairo “on the position of the watch hand,” ʿulamaʾ were the preeminent, indeed the unchallenged, social group in the city who practiced a tradition of knowledge that dealt with precision timekeeping. By 1874–75, when an anonymous scribe wrote the last copy of al-Manhaj al-Aqrab that remains extant today,Footnote ⁸⁶ ʿulamaʾ held a considerably less privileged position. I conclude the story of these manuals and tables by examining their role in the late Ottoman period, when new kinds of actors co-opted—but thereby, in their own way, also maintained—the practices of temporality that the “position of the watch hand” genre had helped to establish.

Beginning in the 1820s, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha, pursued policies of economic, military, and political centralization in order to secure the privilege of dynastic and relatively autonomous rule from the Ottoman sultan.Footnote ⁸⁷ The technical institutions that the Pasha and his successors created in support of those policies have received significant scholarly attention, especially in the areas of engineering, medicine, and translation.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although the history of astronomy is often overlooked in this story, the training of a new kind of astronomer played an important role in a number of viceregal projects. Ismaʿil Mustafa “al-Falaki” (the astronomer) (1825–1901) spent fourteen years in France, during which he trained at and served on the staff of the Observatoire de Paris, before he became the first director of the new Viceregal Observatory at ʿAbbasiyya; he later directed the “École Polytechnique” (muhandiskhāna) in Cairo.Footnote ⁸⁹ Mahmud Hamdi “al-Falaki” (1815–85), who spent nine years in Europe, later served the Viceroy Ismail Pasha as director of the Astronomical Map Authority, minister of public works, and minister of public instruction, and he was the only Egyptian among the founding members of the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe. Footnote ⁹⁰ Both astronomers were sufficiently important to the viceroys to receive the title of “Pasha” toward the end of their careers.

In addition to the success they achieved in government service, these viceregal astronomers also attained a certain degree of public renown. As early as the 1840s, Mahmud Hamdi published almanacs, including prayer tables, said to be widely appreciated in mosques.Footnote ⁹¹ By 1885, the popular journal al-Muqtataf, reviewing the two men's published work, could remark that the journal “does not need to spread word of the excellence of Egypt's two famous astronomers and scholars, since their excellence has become known through the lands, and great scholars have testified to it.”Footnote ⁹²

Notwithstanding the decision of such widely admired state functionaries to publish prayer tables, ʿulamaʾ in Cairo continued to address the timing of prayer in their own way, and specifically in relation to mechanical timekeeping, by producing manuals and tables “on the position of watch hands.” One mid-19th-century scholar, Khalil b. Ibrahim al-ʿAzzazi, authored a manual that instructed other scholars in the technique of producing such tables. Muhammad al-Nabuli was al-ʿAzzazi's contemporary, and may well have used the latter's manual in producing his Natijat Mawqiʿ ʿAqrab al-Saʿat. Footnote ⁹³ Al-ʿAzzazi and al-Nabuli were Azhari ʿulamaʾ who had spent no time in the new, viceregal institutions of science, yet their work was hardly isolated from developments in the period. Al-Nabuli's emphasis on “precision” as opposed to “approximation,” and his decision to provide the times of prayer to the half-minute, can be understood as part of a context in which ʿulamaʾ competed with new actors (as well as among themselves) for credibility. Moreover, his use of half-minute intervals assumed, without comment, an audience possessing mechanical timepieces with minute-hands. On a more technical level, but in some ways even more striking, al-ʿAzzazi's manual invokes a value for the obliquity of the ecliptic that he purports to have taken from “the new, contemporary observations” (al-arṣād al-jadīda al-ḥāliyya), and which appears (based on its size and precision) to be based on observatory data from the 1830s.Footnote ⁹⁴ The manuals and tables produced by these ʿulamaʾ illustrate the ongoing adaptation and persistent relevance of an Islamic scientific tradition and its practitioners even as new institutions, scientific actors, and technologies were increasingly present in Egyptian society.

However, al-Nabuli's 1867–68 almanac is the latest composition that deals specifically with “the position of the watch hand.” Even the long manuscript trail of al-Dimashqi's al-Manhaj al-Aqrab disappears around the same time; as noted above, the latest extant copy is from 1874–75. This date suggests an interesting coincidence. In the summer of 1874, on the front page of Vekayi-i Misriyye (Egyptian Times), the government's principal newspaper, Ismaʿil Mustafa explained a new sound that residents of Cairo would henceforth hear once per day. By rigging a special lens to the firing mechanism of a cannon in the Cairo Citadel, Mahmud Hamdi had developed a time signal that the sun would trigger as it crossed the local meridian.Footnote ⁹⁵ After its inauguration made front-page news, the Citadel time signal quickly became an authoritative source of timekeeping in Cairo. By the end of the year, a British astronomer visiting Cairo could report that “watches are ill used by constant attempts to force them to agree with a gun in Cairo which the Sun itself fires at noon.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The viceregal astronomers' time signal originated in a different physical and social location from the call to prayer. It is fitting that these astronomers, who trained and made their careers within the bureaucracy of the militarizing viceregal state, chose for their time signal a piece of artillery in the traditional center of government in Cairo. In doing so, they adopted a longstanding method of announcing moments of public significance. In the 19th century, cannon fire from the Citadel already marked the departure of the pilgrimage caravan from Cairo, celebrated major political appointments, announced the beginning and end of the fast during Ramadan, and (at least by some accounts) served as the signal for the massacre of the Mamluks in 1811.Footnote ⁹⁷ As a daily time signal, the Citadel cannon continued to serve as an announcement from one of the city's political centers, but now as a marker of the routine rather than the extraordinary. The rapidity with which this signal appears to have displaced the call to prayer as the reference point for setting one's timepiece in Cairo illustrates one way in which viceregal astronomers were able to draw on their political resources to claim a role previously occupied by ʿulamaʾ and muezzins.

However, despite the coincidence of the emergence of this new time signal with the writing of the last extant copy of al-Dimashqi's al-Manhaj al-Aqrab, the Citadel cannon surely did not spell the immediate death of the “position of watch hands” genre or of the relevance of ʿulamaʾ to the practice of mechanical timekeeping. In Egypt, as in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, the practice of ğurūbī sāʿat timekeeping endured among some classes well into the 20th century.Footnote ⁹⁸ We do not know how many people continued to use copies of manuals and tables like al-Dimashqi's or al-Nabuli's. Nor, of course, can we know what copies—or even other compositions—have been lost to history or are yet to be found. But the enduring importance of the Ottoman-Islamic temporal routines promulgated in the ʿulamaʾ's discourse on “the position of the watch hand” can best be seen in the way that Mahmud Hamdi inscribed these routines into the technology of the Citadel cannon itself. The rise of astronomically regulated, public time signals was a global phenomenon in the late 19th century, but one in which “time” typically denoted mean time—an approximation of local time that neglects fluctuation in the length of the day over the course of the solar year. By the 1870s, many regions and even nations were moving toward the adoption of standard mean time, so that “noon” in much of New England, for example, was signaled at the time of mean noon at the location of the Harvard College Observatory.Footnote ⁹⁹ This flattening of the temporal landscape through the elimination of local times facilitated new forms of transportation, commerce, and communication—most famously the railroad.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Citadel cannon deviated from this trend. Instead of signaling mean noon (let alone a standard mean noon) based on an observatory clock, Mahmud went to some trouble to rig a time signal that would fire at the moment of apparent local noon. The most obvious context for his choice was another sound that rang through the air of Cairo every day: the call to prayer, which was also defined in terms of apparent rather than mean time. Thus, in rigging the Citadel cannon, Mahmud was not merely imitating a European and American trend. He was also perpetuating the Ottoman practice of pegging the motion of watch hands to daily changes in the sun's motion through the sky, even if the moment of synchronization became noon rather than sunset. The Citadel cannon points to the way in which ʿulamaʾ faced new competition as knowledge practitioners in 19th-century Egypt, but it also shows how their Ottoman and Islamic ways of keeping time were, in some ways, amplified by this development.