ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Newton and Islam: Arabic Scholarship and the Plural Sciences of Prophecy and Chronology

• In Event: Divining Heaven and Earth

English Abstract

Isaac Newton is often cast as a rationalist icon of Enlightenment science, a figure anchoring triumphalist narratives of a unified Western scientific revolution. Recent scholarship on his manuscripts, however, has fractured this singular image, revealing plural intellectual worlds in which theology, prophecy, chronology, and alchemy sit alongside mathematics and natural philosophy. Building on this shift in perspective, my article explores how Newton’s engagement with Arabic historiography and philology—mediated through his reading of the Oxford Arabist Edward Pocock—shaped his chronological studies and his interpretations of biblical prophecy which then formed a backbone to his natural philosophy.
At the center of my analysis is Folio 36v of Yahuda MS 1.7, a manuscript recording Newton’s extensive notes on the Book of Revelation and containing his only known attempts at writing Arabic. This unusual folio opens a window onto contested sciences and competing temporalities, where Arabic and Islamicate materials become resources in Newton’s effort to reconstruct universal history. Despite its significance for understanding the plurality of Newton’s scholarly orientations, the folio has received almost no sustained attention, aside from a brief mention in a footnote in Rob Iliffe’s Priest of Nature (2017).
By offering the first detailed study of Newton’s Arabic notes and situating them within seventeenth-century Orientalist scholarship, this article argues that Arabic historical and linguistic learning formed an overlooked strand in Newton’s cosmological, theological, and chronological projects, and can help us rethink his ideas about God in the Principia. In so doing, it contributes to a broader rethinking of Newton not as a symbol of a singular Western science, but as a figure working within—and helping to constitute—plural, intersecting worlds of knowledge.

Author

• Fyza Parviz Jazra, Stanford