Author's note: I am grateful to the many readers whose criticisms have improved this article, including On Barak, Michael Cook, Michael Gordin, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, as well as the IJMES editors and anonymous reviewers. Avner Wishnitzer graciously shared forthcoming work. I also acknowledge the invaluable assistance of staff members at the Egyptian National Library (Bab al-Khalq), al-Azhar Library, and the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

¹ I use the word “genre” to indicate that these texts shared a subject matter (the use of mechanical timepieces), a vocabulary (“the position of the watch hand”), and a form (tables, with instructions for their use). While sāʿa could refer to a clock as well as to a watch, I will refer to the genre as dealing with the “position of the watch hand,” since watches were more widely used than clocks in Cairo in this period, and, as this article shows, it was the spread of watches in particular that seems to have spurred the earliest works that I examine.

² On mīqāt, see Brentjes, Sonja and Morrison, Robert G., “The Sciences in Islamic Societies,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 4, ed. Irwin, Robert with Blair, William (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 594–95Google Scholar; King, David A., In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islam, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004)Google Scholar; A. J. Wensinck and D. A. King, “Mīḳāt,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al., Brill Online, 17 March 2015, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/mi-k-a-t-COM_0735; and Charette, François, Mathematical Instrumentation in Fourteenth-Century Egypt and Syria: The Illustrated Treatise of Najm al-Dīn al-Miṣrī (Leiden: Brill, 2003)Google Scholar. Several of the texts examined in this article are very usefully treated in King, In Synchrony. However, King's analysis is focused on the mathematical content of the tables.

³ 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; Ramadan b. Salih al-Khawaniki, Jadawil Mawqiʿ al-Saʿat ʿala Hasab Awqat al-Salawat, Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. See also MS Cairo DM 812, MS Cairo Zakiyya 822.

⁴ Khalil al-ʿAzzazi, Muqaddima fi ʿAmal Mawaqiʿ ʿAqarib al-Saʿat ʿala Qadr al-Hisas al-Sharʿiyya li-Kull ʿArd, MS Cairo TR 204; Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Nabuli, Natijat Mawqiʿ ʿAqrab al-Saʿat ʿala Qadr Hisas Awaʾil Awqat al-Salawat fi al-Shuhur al-Qibtiyya, MS Azhar 317 al-Saqa 28898. I have not been able to examine a text on “the position of watch hands” attributed to Hasan al-Jabarti (d. 1774). See King, In Synchrony, 1:333.

⁵ I discuss the workings of ğurūbī sāʿat below. For a recent overview of the system, and the particular significance it acquired in the late Ottoman period, see Wishnitzer, Avner, “‘Our Time’: On the Durability of the Alaturka Hour System in the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 16 (2010): 47–69Google Scholar.

⁶ Some historians have argued that 18th-century Egypt saw the development of certain trends that resemble hallmarks of “modernity” on the European model. See especially Gran, Peter, Islamic Roots of Capitalism, 1760–1840 (Cairo: AUC Press, 1999 [1979])Google Scholar; and Hanna, Nelly, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Cairo: AUC Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Given the central role that the mechanical clock has played in prominent understandings of European modernity, it might be possible to see the use of mechanical clocks in Ottoman Cairo as further evidence for a kind of “Middle Eastern modernity” before colonialism. As this article emphasizes, however, we ought to distinguish between the spread of mechanical timekeeping and a particular “modern” temporality.

⁷ Zeghal, Malika, “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952–1994),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1991): 371–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Hatina, Meir, ʿUlamaʾ, Politics, and the Public Sphere: An Egyptian Perspective (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁸ See, for example, Eickelman, Dale F. and Piscatori, James P., Muslim Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Starrett, Gregory, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of this debate, see Krämer, Gudrun and Schmidtke, Sabine, eds., Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Zeghal, “Religion and Politics in Egypt”; Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, “Commentaries, Print, and Patronage: Hadith and the Madrasas in Modern South Asia,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 62 (1999): 60–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaman, Ulama in Contemporary Islam.

¹⁰ Important exceptions include El-Rouayheb, Khaled, Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murphy, Jane, “Locating the Sciences in Eighteenth-Century Egypt,” British Journal for the History of Science 43 (2010): 557–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Murphy, “Ahmad al-Damanhuri (1689–1778) and the Utility of Expertise in Early Modern Ottoman Egypt,” Osiris 25 (2010): 85–103; and Crozet, Pascal, Les sciences modernes en Égypte: transfert et appropriation, 1805–1902 (Paris: Geuthner, 2008), 201–30Google Scholar.

¹¹ For an articulation of the decline thesis, see Grunebaum, Gustave Von, “Muslim Worldview and Muslim Science,” Dialectica 17 (1963): 353–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Notable critiques of this thesis include Sabra, A. I., “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement,” History of Science 25 (1987): 223–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saliba, George, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007)Google Scholar; El-Rouayheb, Relational Syllogisms; and, in the context of Ottoman Egypt, El-Rouayheb, , “Opening the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten Arab-Islamic Florescence of the 17th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 38 (2006): 263–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Crozet, Sciences modernes; Elshakry, Marwa, Reading Darwin in Arabic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Shakry, Omnia El, The Great Social Laboratory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Crozet, however, devotes a chapter to the continuity of older scientific traditions among ʿulamaʾ. Marwa Elshakry has also examined the important role played by certain ʿulamaʾ in the debates over Darwin. However, these figures (such as Husayn al-Jisr and Muhammad ʿAbduh) were generally not trained in Islamic scientific traditions.

¹³ This, of course, is only one among many insights to be gleaned from a trove of recent works, including Barak, On, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wishnitzer, Avner, Reading Clocks Alla Turca: Ottoman Temporality and Its Transformation during the Long Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, in a comparative vein, Ogle, Vanessa, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 1376–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a broader chronological perspective, see Georgeon, François and Hitzel, Frédéric, eds., Les Ottomans et le temps (Leiden: Brill, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Wishnitzer, “‘Our Time.’”

¹⁵ Thompson, E. P., “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ For an overview of this movement in time studies, see Glennie, Paul and Thrift, Nigel, “Reworking E.P. Thompson's ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’” Time and Society 5 (1996): 275–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Al-Dimashqi, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab. As far as I am aware, the only scholarly attention this text has received is the mathematical analysis in King, In Synchrony, 1:333. King's statement that the handbook was composed in 1150 AH (1737–38 ad) is an approximation. Cf. the colophon of MS Nuruosmaniye, nr. 2954/1, reproduced in İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddinet al., eds., Osmanlı Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi (hereafter OALT), 2 vols. (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1997), 1:428Google Scholar. None of the other copies I have examined provides a date of composition, let alone a different date.

¹⁸ Al-Dimashqi, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab, Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, p. 24. (For the sake of convenience, I use the pagination on this manuscript that a collector or cataloguer penciled into the upper-right corners.) Since al-Dimashqi specifies that people carried these timepieces on their bodies, I translate sāʿāt as “watches” rather than “clocks.” We should not, however, read juyūb (sing. jayb) in its modern sense as “pockets,” and understand al-Dimashqi as referring to pocket-watches. Jayb only began to refer to a pouch sewn into a pair of pants in the 19th century. Lane, E.W., An Arabic-English Lexicon (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1980)Google Scholar, s.v. jayb; cf. al-Zabidi, Muhammad b. Muhammad Murtada, Taj al-ʿArus min Jawahir al-Qamus (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1994)Google Scholar, s.v. jayb. Perhaps what al-Dimashqi had in mind was similar to what the Ottomans called a koyun saati, or breast watch, referring to “the place between the folded halves of the upper clothing extending to the girdle, which may serve the purpose of a pocket.” Redhouse, James W., A Turkish and English Lexicon, New Ed. (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1996)Google Scholar, s.v. qoyn. See also Özdemir, Kemal, Ottoman Clocks and Watches (Istanbul: Creative Yayıncılık, 1993), 117Google Scholar.

¹⁹ b, Abu al-Fadl Muhammad Khalil. al-Muradi, ʿAli b. Muhammad, Silk al-Durar fi Aʿyan al-Qarn al-Thani ʿAshar, ed. Shahin, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Qadir, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 117Google Scholar. For al-Dimashqi's scientific bibliography, see King, David A., A Survey of the Scientific Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1986), D76Google Scholar; and OALT #281.

²⁰ Historians of clocks and watches in the Ottoman Empire have directed relatively little attention to their use in the Arab provinces in general, focusing instead on Istanbul. Kurz, Otto, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1975)Google Scholar; Özdemir, Ottoman Clocks and Watches; White, Ian, English Clocks for the Eastern Markets (Sussex: Antiquarian Horological Society, 2012)Google Scholar. Some have even suggested that mechanical timepieces were common only in the Turkish-speaking center of the empire. Uğur Tanyeli, “The Emergence of Modern Time-Consciousness in the Islamic World and the Problematics of Spatial Perception,” in Anytime, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 159. One area of Ottoman clock history in the Arab provinces that has received attention is the building of clock towers—but this Hamidian project came only in the late 19th century. Çelik, Zeynep, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French–Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2008), 146–53Google Scholar.

²¹ Kurz, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East. By the 16th century, mechanical clocks had also made their way into Persia. Blake, Stephen, Time in Early Modern Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74Google Scholar.

²² Kurz, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East, 30.

²³ Brentjes, Sonja, “Astronomy a Temptation? On Early Modern Encounters across the Mediterranean Sea,” in Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th–17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge (Variorum Collected Studies) (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), VIII.26Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ben-Zaken, Avner, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 10–21Google Scholar.

²⁵ Özdemir, Ottoman Clocks and Watches, 113. On the economics of Ottoman clock importation, see White, English Clocks for the Eastern Markets.

²⁶ Beaujour, Louis-Auguste Félix de, A View of the Commerce of Greece, Formed after an Annual Average, from 1787 to 1797 (London: H. L. Galabin, 1800), 241Google Scholar. On English trade in the Levant in the 18th century, see Davis, Ralph, Aleppo and Devonshire Square (London: Macmillan, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Kurz, European Clocks, 78–79.

²⁸ De Beaujour, A View of the Commerce of Greece, 241. The quotation is De Beaujour's, apparently paraphrasing a comment that he had heard attributed to Prior.

²⁹ Hanna, In Praise of Books. On the economic history of 18th-century Cairo, see Raymond, André, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1974)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Murphy, Jane, Improving the Mind and Delighting the Spirit: Jabarti and the Sciences in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cairo (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006)Google Scholar.

³¹ El-Rouayheb, “Opening the Gate of Verification,” with quotation on p. 268.

³² Murphy, “Ahmad al-Damanhuri.”

³³ Murphy, “Locating the Sciences,” 564.

³⁴ MS Cairo DM 812. The colophon identifies the copyist as Mahmud khalīfat bāb-ı camalīyān. Catalogers have misinterpreted the italicized phrase as part of the copyist's name. (See OALT # 325 and King, Survey of the Scientific Manuscripts, D96.) In fact, camalīyān is a corruption, peculiar to Egypt, of gönüllüyān, the “Volunteers” of the Ottoman military system. The term appears with its proper Turkish spelling in the manuscript's statement of ownership, where Mahmud is named again. Camalīyān is apparently a play on the association of the gönüllüyān with their camels—thus, “Cameleers” instead of “Volunteers.” See Philipp, Thomas and Schwald, Guido, A Guide to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī's History of Egypt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994), 336Google Scholar.

³⁵ Mahmud owned other scientific manuscripts, including a work on weights and measures. See King, Survey of the Scientific Manuscripts, D96 and Pl. CXb. However, this is not to say that his copy of al-Dimashqi's work was a government document. It bears no indications of being such.

³⁶ The gönüllüyān did not enjoy tīmār holdings like the cavalry of the central provinces. They do appear to have been a relatively large regiment in the middle of the 18th century. Hathaway, Jane, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlıs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 33, 40Google Scholar.

³⁷ Hanna, In Praise of Books, 41–44.

³⁸ Possibly prayer-times specifically. al-Jabarti, ʿAbd al-Rahman, ʿAjaʾib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wa-l-Akhbar, ed. al-Din, Ibrahim Shams (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1997), 1:219–20Google Scholar.

³⁹ Philip and Perlmann, in their translation of al-Jabarti, give “almanacs,” without explanation. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī's History of Egypt, ed. Thomas Philipp and Moshe Perlmann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994), 1:360. Hanna and Murphy both remark that al-Mahalli made his living as a copyist and bookseller. Hanna, In Praise of Books, 41; Murphy, Improving the Mind, 136. Perhaps the idea originated in a footnote to a 1958 edition, which glosses manākīb as taqāwīm (ephemerides, or calendars). See al-Jabarti, ʿAbd al-Rahman, ʿAjaʾib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wa-l-Akhbar, ed. Jawhar, Hasan Muhammad et al. (Cairo: Lajnat al-Bayan al-ʿArabi, 1958–67), 2:140Google Scholar. I am unable to find a justification for this reading other than al-Jabarti's statement that the manākīb have something to do with knowledge of time.

⁴⁰ Mubarak, ʿAli, al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida (Bulaq: al-Matbaʿa al-Kubra al-Amiriyya, 1304–6 [1886–89]), 15:25Google Scholar.

⁴¹ An Arabic lexicon from the 17th century notes that “the masses” (al-ʿāmma) have altered the word bankām to minkāb. al-Khafaji, Ahmad b. Muhammad b. ʿUmar, Shifaʾ al-Ghalil fi ma fi Kalam al-ʿArab min al-Dakhil, ed. Kashshash, Muhammad (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 94Google Scholar.

⁴² Hill, Donald, Arabic Water-Clocks (Aleppo: University of Aleppo Institute for the History of Arabic Science, 1981)Google Scholar. The better-known Arabic word that also derives from the Persian pingān is finjān, a small drinking vessel. See Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. filjān. Ben-Zaken suggests that bankām had an older, Latin origin. Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Exchanges, 19.

⁴³ For example: “the degrees of [right] ascensions are the degrees of the equinoctial, which are the degrees of time taken from al-manākib.” Muhammad al-Khudari al-Dimyati, Sharh al-Lumʿa fi Hall al-Kawakib al-Sabʿa, Isl. Ms. 722, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, p. 142. See also Ibrahim Shihab al-Din b. Hasan, Sharh ʿala Muqaddimat al-Shaykh Mahmud fi ʿIlm al-Miqat, MS Cairo ṬM 225, fols. 11v (where minkām and minkāb are equated), 16r, and 21r. In context, these devices appear to be sand clocks.

⁴⁴ However, minkāb, as an etymological resource for describing new timepieces, survived at least into the late 19th century, when the Syrian litterateur Ibrahim al-Yaziji noted that Moroccans applied the term minjāna to pocket-watches. Asʾila ila Majallat “al-Bayan” wa-Ajwibat al-Shaykh Ibrahim al-Yaziji ʿalayha (Beirut: Dar al-Hamraʾ, 1993), 88.

⁴⁵ Khafaji, Shifaʾ al-Ghalil, 94. Similarly, the use of minkām (another variant) for sand clock occurs as early as the 13th century, and as late at the 19th century. Saliba, George, “An Observational Notebook of a Thirteenth-Century Astronomer,” Isis 74 (1983): 398n11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Çelebi, Katip, Kashf al-Zunun ʿan Asami al-Kutub wa-l-Funun (Beirut: Dar Ihyaʾ al-Turath al-ʿArabi, 1995), 1:255Google Scholar. The entire passage closely follows the introduction to Taqi al-Din's treatise, The Brightest Stars in Wheeled Clocks, wherein “wheeled” (dawriyya) denotes mechanical devices, as opposed to sand or water clocks. (I translate dawriyya as “wheeled” in allusion to medieval European usage. See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 54.) For the original passage in Taqi al-Din, see Tekeli, Sevim, 16'ıncı Asırda Osmanlılarda Saat ve Takiyüddin'in “Mekanik Saat Konstrüksüyonuna Dair En Parlak Yıldızlar” Adlı Eseri (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1966), 219–20Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Moreh understands minkāmāt to mean water clocks, in keeping with the older Arabic usage of bankāmāt. Napoleon in Egypt: al-Jabartī's Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798, trans. Shmuel Moreh (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2004 [1975]), 110. However, clepsydras do not appear in La Décade égyptienne or La Description de l'Égypte, except in reference to ancient Egyptian technology. Describing their own clocks, the savants only mention mechanical timepieces. See, for example, Nouet, M., “Observations astronomiques faites en Égypte pendant les années VI, VII, et VIII [1798, 1799, 1800],” La Description de l'Égypte: État moderne (Paris: L'Impremerie impériale, 1809), 1:1Google Scholar, accessed 17 March 2015, http://www.descegyp.bibalex.org.

⁴⁸ For al-Khawaniki's biography, see Mubarak, al-Khitat, 10:90.

⁴⁹ Berkey, Jonathan, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chamberlain, Michael, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Mubarak, al-Khitat, 10:90.

⁵¹ Muradi, Silk al-Durar, 3:117.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Eight copies (in addition to the autograph) appear in OALT #281. I am aware of two more: MS Cairo Zakiyya 822, and Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. For copies including al-Khawaniki's tables, see e.g., MS Cairo DM 812, MS Cairo Zakiyya 822, and Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

⁵⁴ The Michigan copy belonged to Max Meyerhof, who lived in Egypt in the early 20th century and was an important early figure in the historiography of Islamic science and medicine. See Schacht, Joseph, “Max Meyerhof,” Osiris 9 (1950): 7–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ MS Cairo DM 1104, MS Cairo TR 286, and Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, respectively.

⁵⁶ Al-Wardani was the copyist of an 1801 copy of al-Kawm al-Rishi's al-Lumʿa (Houghton MS Arab 249). Al-Sharbatli appears as the scribe in an 1823 copy of Ridwan Effendi's treatise on timekeeping, Dustur Usul ʿIlm al-Miqat, Isl. Ms. 760, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

⁵⁷ See King, Survey of the Scientific Manuscripts, D107; and Shaykh Saʿd b. Ahmad al-ʿAbbani, Muʿarraba li-Sana Shamsiyya 1242, MS Azhar 371 Jawhari 42103.

⁵⁸ I am assuming he was Ridwan b. Muhammad b. Sulayman “al-Mukhallilati” (ca. 1834–93). See al-Murati, Abu al-Khayr ʿUmar b. al-Murabah b. Hasan b. ʿAbd al-Qadir, ed., Muqaddima Sharifa Kashifa lima Ihtawat ʿalayhi min Rasm al-Kalimat al-Qurʾaniyya wa-Dabtiha wa-ʿAdd al-Ayy al-Munifa (Ismailia: Maktabat al-Imam al-Bukhari, 1427 [2006]), 41–49Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Adıvar, Adnan, La science chez les Turcs Ottomans (Paris: Librairie Orientale et Américaine, 1939), 142Google Scholar; İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin, Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire: Western Influence, Local Institutions, and the Transfer of Knowledge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)Google Scholar; Crozet, Sciences modernes.

⁶⁰ For an overview, see Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, chap. 1.

⁶¹ Lane, E. W., An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: The Definitive 1860 Edition (Cairo: AUC Press, 2003), 220Google Scholar.

⁶² Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks; Ünver, Süheyl, “Osmanlı Türkleri İlim Tarihinde Muvakkithaneler,” Atatürk Konferansları 5 (1975): 217–57Google Scholar; Aydüz, Salim, “İstanbul'da Zamanın Nabzını Tutan Mekanlar: Muvakkithaneler,” İstanbul 51 (2004): 92–97Google Scholar.

⁶³ For an overview of the history of the muwaqqit, see King, In Synchrony, 1:631–75.

⁶⁴ Even if we assume, following Lane, that people simply listened instead for the muezzin's sunset (maghrib) call to prayer, the muezzin himself needed a way to know when to give the call. Typically, he could have observed the sunset himself or relied on the guidance of a muwaqqit—but now, perhaps, he could have used his own mechanical timepiece.

⁶⁵ For an overview, see King, In Synchrony, 1:206–8.

⁶⁶ King, In Synchrony, 1:333. Factors that al-Dimashqi considered include: the equation of time; the slight motion of the sun in the ecliptic during a given day; the “minutes of variation” (daqāʾiq al-ikhtilāf) due to refraction; and a standard value for the radius of the sun as it appears in the sky.

⁶⁷ Al-Dimashqi, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab, Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, p. 24.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ For a description of one type of instrument, the rubʿ al-muqanṭarāt, that was commonly used for taking altitudes in this period, see Morley, William H., “Description of an Arabic Quadrant,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 17 (1860): 322–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ On the question of whether the expense of instrumentation was a social barrier to the practice of the sciences in Cairo in the 18th century, see Murphy, “Ahmad al-Damanhuri,” 93.

⁷¹ Al-Nabuli, Natijat Mawqiʿ ʿAqrab al-Saʿat, 51.

⁷² MS Cairo DM 812, MS Cairo Zakiyya 822, and Isl. Ms. 808, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. However, al-Khawaniki's tables are organized by degree of solar longitude rather than calendar dates.

⁷³ On determining the prayer intervals in an Egyptian manual on the astrolabic quadrant written in 1901, see al-Fadl, Muhammad ibn ʿAli ibn Abi, al-Riyad al-Zahirat fi al-ʿAml bi-Rubʿ al-Muqantarat (Cairo: al-Matbaʿa al-ʿAmira al-Sharqiyya, 1904–5), 14–15Google Scholar. On the diverse ways in which Muslim astronomers historically expressed the times of prayer, see King, In Synchrony, 1:204–8.

⁷⁴ Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks.

⁷⁵ Cf. Bourdieu, Pierre, “Time Perspectives of the Kabyle,” in The Sociology of Time, ed. Hassard, John (London: Macmillan, 1990): 219–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁶ White, English Clocks; Özdemir, Ottoman Clocks and Watches.

⁷⁷ Kurz, European Clocks and Watches, 46. For a recent discussion of this phenomenon in the broader context of Ottoman attitudes toward figural art, see Flood, Finbarr Barry, “Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 568CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁸ Barkley, H.C., Bulgaria before the War: During Seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: John Murray, 1877), 180–81Google Scholar. A longer quotation is also reproduced in White, English Clocks for the Eastern Markets, 15.

⁷⁹ Barak, On Time.

⁸⁰ See also De Beaujour, A View of the Commerce of Greece, 242.

⁸¹ A phenomenon that, as White remarks, was true not only in Ottoman contexts, but also in Europe and China during this period. White, English Clocks for the Eastern Markets, 28.

⁸² Al-Dimashqi, al-Manhaj al-Aqrab.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Al-Nabuli, Natijat Mawqiʿ ʿAqrab al-Saʿat, MS Azhar 317/al-Saqa 28898, 50v.

⁸⁵ Historians of precision have generally emphasized the new political and commercial contexts of the 19th century. More remains to be done to understand the religious history of precision. Cf. Wise, M. Norton, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ See MS Cairo ṬM 88.

⁸⁷ Fahmy, Khaled, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: AUC Press, 2002 [1997])Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Crozet, Sciences modernes; Ghislaine Alleaume, L'école polytechnique du Caire et ses élèves: la formation d'une élite technique dans l'Égypte du XIXème siècle (PhD diss., Université de Lyon II, 1993); Kozma, Liat, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Abugideiri, Hibba, Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010)Google Scholar; and Fahmy, Khaled, “Medicine and Power: Towards a Social History of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 23, no. 2, ed. Hill, Enid (Cairo: AUC Press, 2000), 16–62Google Scholar. See also the classic and still useful works of al-Karim, Ahmad ʿAbd, Tarikh al-Taʿlim fi ʿAsr Muhammad ʿAli (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, 1938)Google Scholar; and Heyworth-Dunne, J., An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac, 1939)Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ On Mustafa, Ismaʿil, see “Notice biographique sur S.E. Ismail Pacha El-Falaki,” Bulletin de la société khédiviale de géographie, 6th Ser. (Cairo: Impremerie nationale, 1908)Google Scholar; and Crozet, Sciences modernes, 277.

⁹⁰ On Mahmud Hamdi, see Crozet, Pascal, “La Trajectoire d'un scientifique égyptien au XIXe siècle,” in Entre reforme sociale et movement national: Identité et modernization en Égypte (1882–1962), ed. Roussillon, Alain (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1995), 285–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the hagiographic but useful work of Dimirdash, Ahmad, Mahmud Hamdi al-Falaki (Cairo: al-Dar al-Misriyya li-l-Taʾlif wa-l-Tarjama, 1966)Google Scholar; and the two eulogies delivered by his contemporaries and published in Notices biographiques sur S.E. Mahmoud-Pacha El Falaki (Cairo: Impremerie Nationale, 1886). On Mahmud's role in the creation of Egyptian traditions of Egyptology and Orientalism, see Reid, Donald, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002), 152–53, 226Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Crozet, “Trajectoire,” 291.

⁹² “Hadaya wa-Taqariz,” al-Muqtataf 9 (1885): 282.

⁹³ Al-Nabuli, Natijat Mawqiʿ ʿAqrab al-Saʿat. All of al-Nabuli's known works date to the 1860s, during the last years of al-ʿAzzazi's life. See al-Nabuli, Fath al-Mannan ʿala al-Manzuma al-Musamma Tuhfat al-Ikhwan (Cairo: Matbaʿat Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi, 1325 [1907]), which the author completed in 1862 (as stated on p. 46 of this 1907 print edition); and al-Nabuli, Kashf al-Hijab ʿan Murshid al-Tulab, Ms Azhar 386 ʿArusi 42765, an 1863–64 commentary on another work that he wrote in 1862–63.

⁹⁴ Al-ʿAzzazi expresses the value in sexagesimal notation, but it works out to roughly 23º 27ʾ 42”.52. The closest recorded observations that I have found appear in Pond, John, Astronomical Observations Made at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (London: T. Bensley, 1830), 87Google Scholar. Government observatories like Greenwich published such observations in nautical almanacs, to which it is plausible that al-ʿAzzazi might have had access, although he would have needed a translator's assistance.

⁹⁵ Ismaʿil Mustafa Bey, “Hawadis-i Dahiliye: Fi Sharh Midfaʿ al-Zawal,” Ruzname-i Vekayi-i Misriyye 24 Rabi-ul-Sani 1291/9 June 1874, p. 1. The sun's apparent annual motion meant that the lens had to be adjusted frequently in order to catch the sun's rays at the meridian.

⁹⁶ Quoted in Ratcliff, Jessica, The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 187n26Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ See Gellion-Danglar, Eugène, Lettres sur l'Égypte contemporaine (1865–1875) (Paris: Sandoz et Fisch-bacher, n.d.), 45, 18Google Scholar; Hall, Trowbridge, Egypt in Silhouette (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 29Google Scholar, 53 (although the latter work's account of 19th-century events is unattributed and must be taken with several grains of salt).

⁹⁸ In Egypt, almanacs continued to print “Arab” time alongside “European” time at least as late as the 1930s. See Naji, Mahmud, Natijat al-Dawla al-Misriyya li-Sanat 1354 Hijriyya (Cairo: al-Matbaʿa al-Amiriyya, 1935)Google Scholar. The branding of ğurūbī sāʿat (literally, “sunset time”) as “Arab” or, in Turcophone areas,“Turkish” (alaturka) time was part of the politics of temporality that Barak and Wishnitzer have explored, in which both colonial and anticolonial elites treated time as a marker of cultural difference. Barak, On Time; Wishnitzer, “ʿOur Time.ʾ”

⁹⁹ Bartky, Ian, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ In addition to Bartky, Selling the True Time, see Galison, Peter, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003)Google Scholar. But for a global history recasting the era of “time standardization” as, in fact, a period of differentiation in timekeeping conventions, see Ogle, “Whose Time Is It?”

¹⁰¹ Barak, On Time.