What was science, who was involved in it, and where did it unfold in the modern Middle East and North Africa? These are the three questions raised in this piece. The following notes echo my past research on the growth and societal relevance of biomedical sciences in Iran, and are also informed by a new interest in social sciences and, more particularly, in the establishment in 1927 of the Social Science Research Section at the American University of Beirut (AUB; called Syrian Protestant College until 1920) and its subsequent work. A handful of social scientists led by the American Stuart Dodd and financed by the US Rockefeller Foundation, which was active worldwide, helped turn AUB into a hub not only of education, but more than before, of research too. Covering wide swathes of the “Near East,” these social scientists framed that region as an extraordinary “laboratory” for social science research.Footnote ¹ This story links up with a question about Iran. Why and how in the 1940s–1950s did social sciences, primarily sociology, supplant biomedical sciences as the dominant matrix for heuristically constructing Iranian “society” and for steering societal change?Footnote ² This case is fascinating because it had parallels elsewhere and because “Third World” Iranian sociologists built transnational networks, partly outside of Europe and mostly in “First World” France and the United States.Footnote ³

This inquiry into which the set of science was particularly influential in explaining the world is one example of the question of “what” posed above. Another pair of questions about Iran in the first half of the 20th century is this: what is considered science, and how has that definition changed over time? Here we can consider three interrelated themes. First, it mattered that in Iran interest in scientific knowledge did not go hand in hand with serious industrialization, for which of course technology is key. This does not mean that definitions of science in Iran were altogether different than, say, in Western Europe and the United States. In Iran as in the West, there was more than one definition of what science was, and what it was about. But in Iran the bandwidth of definitions was narrower and principally concerned with professional applications of science for societal aims.

Second, questions of universalism and cultural authenticity mattered to many people pondering the question of what is science. Not unlike in the West, especially during the era of high imperialism, some non-Westerners, including in Iran, wanted to have their cake and it too. The West claimed that its achievements made it a universal model, but simultaneously called its science and technology “Western” (or “European”). Many Iranians, like others who could make a claim to an old civilization of their own, rejected that latter assertion. They averred that modern science and technology belong to everybody rather than being the prerogative of the mighty West alone. But they also asserted their own nonuniversalistic, culturalist superiority, pointing out that medieval and Renaissance Europe had received knowledge from the Islamic (or Iranian) world. Although this point was accurate, it drew on civilization categories such as “Islam” or “Iran” that were never so clearly delimited. Some took this even further and claimed that all modern scientific discoveries had already been made by their forefathers or, in the case of devout Muslims, by God, recorded however indirectly in the Quran.Footnote ⁴

Third, the study of science exemplifies the complexity of the Islamic Republic of Iran. That republic is, well, Islamic, and its conservatives greatly care for their historical and cultural authenticity. But as it has expanded its scientific and industrial infrastructure established in the late Pahlavi era, some science practitioners have come to define science in more universalistic terms.

This leads to my second question of “who” spoke in the name of science, which also allows me to highlight three related issues. The first, obvious one is that the category of the “scientist” is neither clear nor fixed, but evolves as the meanings and applications of science shifted. Second, we could benefit from more, and more comparative and relational, work on the question of the social prestige granted by modern scientific knowledge. Especially doctors and engineers have profited from that knowledge, but also sociologists, lawyers and others. This issue matters, too, because in the 20th century modern middle classes used expertise to claim a seat at the table of government. Also, it might help to link Middle Eastern history to global trends like the worldwide emergence, from the late 19th century, of highly educated middle-class professionals who often made meritocratic demands on their states and societies.Footnote ⁵

Third, science, as well as technology and medicine, are tied to politics, state power, and state competition.Footnote ⁶ In this last regard, a case par excellence is Arab explanations of Israeli military victories and recommendations about countermeasures. Consider Qustantin Zurayq's famous Maʿna al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Nakba), published in 1948. While recommending immediate countermeasures to Israel's success, most crucially the consolidation of Arab economic, political, and military forces, Zurayq held that a “fundamental solution” of the Zionist challenge would require Arabs to change fundamentally. His premise was that Israel's victory was not simply one of “nation over nation” (qawm ʿalā qawm), but one of “system over system” (niẓām ʿala niẓām). “While we are still dreaming the dreams of the past,” Zurayq insisted, Zionism lives “in the present and future,” “linked to modern Western life.” To defeat it, the Arabs would have to create a “progressive united national Arab existence” (kiyān ʿarabī qawmī muttaḥad taqaddumī). In turn, this would necessitate becoming “in deed and spirit . . . part of the world in which we live.” And this in turn would require, amongst other measures, “adopting technology” and “training and ordering the mind by [making] it accept the positivist and experimental sciences” (al-ʿulūm al-wadʿiyya wa-l-tajribiyya).Footnote ⁷

This leaves the question of “where,” through which I would like to highlight three aspects. We might begin by considering the position of the Middle East in global science networks. Let me again start by looking at the matter at hand through the case of Iran. Until the mid-20th century, that country's position was semicolonial, which meant it was marginal within global science and scientific data collection networks. It was neither a colony like India, which was central to said networks, nor a metropole like Britain, nor a country like the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey, which was much closer to Europe and therefore more systemically tied into such networks at an earlier date. (The same is true of 19th-century positivism, which brought together Ottomans and Latin Americans.Footnote ⁸) Clearly, then, in the global field of science, the Middle East was not a single geopolitical block.

A second aspect of the question of “where” concerns internal regional networks. Let me use the example of AUB again to illustrate it. In the interwar years, that university's social scientists, as well as other professors and administrators, formed a loose but regularly convened Near Eastern College Consortium that, in addition to AUB, included the American University of Cairo, Robert College of Istanbul, and the US Presbyterian High School in Tehran (later called Alborz), amongst other American institutions. While education rather than science creation was the key objective of this consortium, people such as Dodd used it for their own research purposes and to network.Footnote ⁹ What is more, into the 1940s Dodd and a number of other AUB professors, including in economics, exchanged notes on scientific matters with Yishuvi institutions. While often explicitly disagreeing politically, they shared an interest in scientific data collection and knowledge creation within their shared area, Bilad al-Sham.Footnote ¹⁰

Finally, let me conclude with a note on hubs and hierarchies. The importance, since the late 19th century, of Beiruti institutions like the SPC/AUB and the Université de Saint-Joseph as regional education and knowledge hubs illustrates that geographies of science were not metropolitan hubs with derivative colonial spokes. Rather, there were ample cross-connections throughout the Middle East, as the last paragraph has illustrated, too.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, institutions in the very few Middle Eastern cities that, like Beirut, had become a real presence in global culture and trade circuits in the 19th century, by the interwar period connected “their” region—in Beirut's case, Bilad al-Sham and even countries beyond it—to knowledge institutions elsewhere. Certainly from this perspective, then, the history of science in the Middle East by necessity needs to be a history of the Middle East in the world as well.