Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 427.
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        Date: 2026-04-21 11:37:21+00:00
        From: Jean Arzoumanov <jean.arzoumanov@GMAIL.COM>
        Subject: Invitation: Matthew Melvin-Koushki – Persianate Pythagorean Computing, Early Modern AI and the Imperial Panopticon

[via MERSENNE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK]

Dear colleagues,

I am delighted to invite you to an online lecture tomorrow (22 April
2026) by Prof. Matthew Melvin-Koushki (University of South Carolina),
from 15:00 to 16:30.

Prof. Matthew Melvin-Koushki’s lecture is titled “Persianate
Pythagorean Computing, Early Modern AI and the Imperial Panopticon: From
the Safavid World of Geomancy to the Mughal Principles of Guidance”.

The lecture will be accessible on Zoom via the following link:

HTTPS://EU02WEB.ZOOM-X.DE/J/67795520099 [1]

It will be the third event in this spring’s ASTRA Colloquium series
“Occult Sciences in South Asia: A Non-Western History”. The full
program is available here [2].

Abstract:

Much like current AI, the historiography of computing is curiously
amnesiac and hallucinatory. Most specialists assume this Hermetic binary
science to be a very recent, exclusively Euro-American and Cold War
affair; those who hold up Leibniz (d. 1716) as modern computing’s
father are at pains to abstract him from his actual socio-intellectual
context, whereby the “last Platonist” could only have been distantly
inspired by the Chinese I Ching—certainly never the peculiarly
Afro-Islamic technology of geomancy. Soul of applied Pythagoreanism
throughout early modern Afro-Eurasia and obviously Leibniz’s proximate
Latinate source, its considerably more sophisticated post-Mongol
formulations made that “sand science” (ʿilm al-raml) a primary
technology of Persianate empire, indeed the OG Artificial Cosmic
Intelligence and imperial Panopticon.

This paper presents as historiographical control two of the most
watershed geomantic manuals in the Greater Western tradition: Shāh
Mullā Munajjim-i Shīrāzī’s World of Geomancy (Jahān al-raml) of
1576, written for Safavid state purposes; and his star student Hidāyat
Allāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī’s even more comprehensive Principles of
Guidance (Qavāʿid al-hidāya) of 1593, dedicated to the Mughal World
Emperor Akbar himself. Naturally still unedited and unstudied for the
crime of being written in post-Mongol Persian, such imperially explicit
Panopticonic Sand-Scientific works are not just of outsize importance
for the early modern history of science, technology, and empire
generally and computing specifically; understanding their geomantic
genealogy may help us to better sociopolitically, epistemologically, and
ecologically navigate our own Silicon Oracles today, lest they be
world-wrecking.

Biography:

Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor of Islamic
History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early
modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological
focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in
Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth
century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of
philosophy and history of the book through the lens of the Islamic
Weird. His forthcoming books include _Persian Pythagoreanism, Imperial
Occultism and Mathematical-Linguistic Science in the Timurid
Renaissance: The Lettrist Treatises of Ibn Turka and The Occult Science
of Empire in Early Modern Iran: Four Persian Lettrists and Their Manuals
of Magic_, and he is co-editor of the volumes _Islamicate Occultism: New
Perspectives_ (2017) and _Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and
Practice_ (2021). President of Societas Magica, he is also co-PI of the
ERC Synergy project MOSAIC: Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate
Cultures (2025–2031).

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Best wishes,
Jean Arzoumanov
Postdoctoral Scholar
FG ASTRA
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG)
Boltzmannstr. 22
14195 Berlin


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