As a young child who enjoys the sea, Ahmed AlMaazmi recalls his grandmother’s loving reminder to salute a sea saint, “Al-Khidr,” who will watch over him in the water before he takes the plunge.
Today, as assistant professor of history at NYU Abu Dhabi, AlMaazmi sees that ritual as more than family folklore. It captures the enchanted world he now studies, where people in Arabia and the Indian Ocean lived with courts and contracts, but also saints, talismans, and unseen forces.
His research traces how occult-scientific knowledge like astrology, lettrism, and alchemy shaped power and life as far back as the 15th century, revealing Arabia as a driving force in the early modern Indian Ocean.
“Arabia is not a blank space in the history of science,” he says. “Its story should be told from the perspective of its own inhabitants. When you study the archives, you find amazing accounts that reshape how we think about law, empire, and this region’s place in the world.”
Beyond the archives
Long before he opened a manuscript, AlMaazmi collected history in living rooms and majlis in his Sharjah neighborhood. As an international studies undergraduate at Zayed University, he became fascinated by local legacy. Talking to his grandparents, he realized how little of their experience of Gulf life appeared in the books he read.
“Published histories leaned on colonial sources,” he says. “People like my grandparents were almost invisible. The stories of people like them weren’t there.” In class, history meant memorizing wars and dates. At home, it was vivid, local, and specific.
An anthropology professor offered a way forward. If the archives he needed did not exist, he could build them. AlMaazmi began interviewing elderly Emiratis about childhood, work, migration, and the Gulf's rapid transformation.
He discovered his great-grandfather joined seasonal pearling expeditions and traveled the region for work. Friends and neighbors added their own memories, producing what he now sees as “a much more crowded, complicated picture of Gulf life.”
Those conversations set his direction. “Studies of the Gulf overwhelmingly focus on the post‑oil period,” he says, “while research on the pre‑oil era is maybe one percent of what we have after.
“Through my work, I want to bring attention to family collections, local archives, and oral histories. They show not just how people lived, but how they understood the world – the beliefs and practices that made it make sense to them.”
Enchanted empires and everyday magic
AlMaazmi’s route to academia took a few turns. He moved between Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi and United Arab Emirates University before earning his BA in International Studies at Zayed University, combining history, economics, and political science.
A Fulbright scholarship took him to Rutgers for graduate work in cultural anthropology, then to Princeton, where he earned a PhD in Near Eastern Studies, becoming the first Emirati to earn a doctorate from the university.
There, his dissertation on occultism, empire, and society in the Western Indian Ocean won the Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award from the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) and an honorable mention from the World History Association.
In Princeton’s Arabian and East African archives, the stories he heard at home intersected with another kind of evidence. While reading manuscripts from Arabia and the Indian Ocean, he noticed margins full of talismanic diagrams, astrological birth charts, and alchemical recipes for protection, healing, or harm. At first he thought these notes might form a single chapter. Then he started collecting them.
“As I gathered these marginalia, I saw them everywhere,” he says. Occult-scientific practices appeared not only in treatises but across legal texts, poetry, architecture, and everyday documents. The more he looked, the clearer it became that early modern rulers, scholars, merchants, and enslaved people all operated in a world understood as interconnected and alive with invisible forces.
Now, he is working on a book about the Yaʿrubī Empire — the Omani dynasty that built a powerful maritime state in the western Indian Ocean in the 17th century — examining how occult sciences shaped both imperial and day-to-day life.
“These sciences were technologies of power,” he explains. “Rulers, scholars, and ordinary people used them as part of their daily toolkit.”
Teaching new perspectives
AlMaazmi joined NYUAD in 2026 and offers a course titled “The Gulf in the Age of Empires,” which takes students on a sweeping journey from the medieval world of the Gulf to the current war.
His work has also reached beyond the classroom. This semester, he contributed to Emirates of Pearls and Aromas: A Deep-Rooted Legacy, Shaping the Future, an exhibition at Qasr Al Watan exploring the role of pearls, oud, and ambergris in Emirati history and identity.
He is also developing “Magic on Trial: Law, Science, and Global Witch Hunts,” a course exploring how ideas of science, religion, and law change over time, starting with the UAE’s evolving relationship with Harry Potter, from early bans in schools to an upcoming theme park at Warner Bros. World.
“It’s a familiar story,” he says, “but it opens up big questions about what different societies are willing to label as magic, as danger, or just as entertainment.”
For AlMaazmi, his work extends beyond academia. He wants to help local communities preserve and share their own stories, while giving students the tools to question how those histories are recorded and understood.
“I tell my students that we are storytellers and the stories we tell really matter,” he says. “They shape how people understand themselves, where they come from, and the world they live in.”