In this interview, Ahmad Dallal traces his intellectual and personal journey from Lebanon to the United Sates and back, while addressing his research trajectory, AUB Provost experience, and future research plans.
Dallal’s academic training and research focus is on the intellectual, historical, and institutional contexts of the disciplines of learning in medieval and early modern Islamic societies, covering both the exact and the traditional sciences. His first book, An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy; Kitab Ta‘dil Hay’at al-Aflak of Sadr al-Shari‘a (E.J. Brill, 1995), examines the astronomical work of the fourteenth century scientist and religious scholar Sadr al-Shari‘a al-Bukhari. Al-Bukhari produced several renowned works on traditional religious sciences, and wrote an Islamic critique and reconstruction of Ptolemaic astronomy. In his second Book, Islam, Science and the Challenge of History, Professor Dallal examines the significance of scientific Knowledge and situates the culture of science in relation to other cultural forces in Muslim societies. Between 2000 and 2003, he was an Associate Professor at the Department of History at Stanford University, USA. And from 2003 to 2009 he served as the Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. Between 2009 and 2015 he served as the Provost of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He is currently Professor of History at the American University of Beirut.
The interview below includes five parts that you can click on separately. Please find a transcript of the interview below the player.
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