Praying and Witnessing

This chapter examines the role of prayer (dova) in Muslim life. The act of prayer belongs to the villagers’ repertoires of vital exchange whereby blessing, prosperity, and vitality are accessed, and relations between life and the afterlife, and between the living, the dead, and the divine are maintained and cultivated. Prayer is thus crucial in villagers’ temporal orientations toward the past, present, and the future. The chapter focuses on two major forms of prayer. First, it explores how prayer is deployed to address matters here and now, and/or prospectively by introducing examples of Islamic healing, and dream visions and divination. Second, it analyzes how acts of prayer intersect with and shape the ethics of memory. It shows how the idiom of dova provides village Muslims with a vocabulary with which to engage with the critical events of the past and becomes a mode of historical experience. Specifically, it focuses on how prayer is performed by the living for the souls of the dead, including war martyrs from the 1992-95 war, as well as from the Ottoman era.

Unani Medicine in the Making

Unani Medicine in the Making examines the institutions and practices of Unani medicine, the Graeco-Islamic healing practice based on the humoral theory attributed to Hippocrates and officially recognized as a system of medicine in India. Drawing on diverse materials, including Urdu sources, interviews with practitioners, and observations in clinics, the book explores what Unani medicine is today by attending to its multiplicity, scrutinizing apparent tensions between the understanding of Unani as a system of medicine and its multiple enactments as Islamic medicine, medical science, or alternative medicine. Ethnographic details provide vivid descriptions of the current practice of Unani in India, and invite readers to rethink the idea that humoral medicine is incommensurable with modern medicine and science, and that the modernization of Asian medicines invariably leads to their biomedicalization. Ultimately, the book also discusses the relationship of Unani with Muslim communities, examining the growing practice of Prophetic Medicine in Urban India and increasing representations of Unani as Islamic Medicine.

Ideal Type of Islamic Healing in Indonesia: A Case Study on Pak Endog Alternative Islamic-Type Medication

The map of Islamic healing is often interpreted based only on the values of Islamic teachings. Some cultural and religious concepts and practices concerning spiritual or supernatural relationships are often ignored because they are contrary to the concept of Islamic teachings. This article analyzes the Islamic healing practiced in the socio-cultural life inherently. The religious space practice in terms of identification, healing and restoration of illness illustrates that the interaction between religion and culture is not rigid in addressing health and humanitarian issues. This article is based on field research at alternative healing in Tuban East Java which elaborated by enrichment of literary texts. The results of this study discuss various types of Islamic-based healing as alternative medicine that spreading in Indonesian culture. This study map analyzes the characteristics of Islamic healing, both Normative Islam and Cultural Islam. Both cannot be ignored as variants of religious and cultural practices in the health context.

Traditional Arabic and Islamic Medicine Primary Methods in Applied Therapy

Applied therapy is a commonly utilized method of treatment for preventive and therapeutic measures. Avicenna, a significant physician of the Islamic golden age, described 36 methods to restore balance of patients’ elements, humors and faculties. We propose a categorization of these methods within a single theory and framework, as this has previously been lacking. To be considered under the rubric of TAIM applied therapies, the procedures must have: 1) proof of use in the Arab and Muslim world; 2) considered an essential component of Avicenna’s compendium of regimental therapy; and 3) historical lineage according to regional, cultural or Islamic healing practices. We developed a taxonomy of applied therapies by denoting each as a primary or supportive method and providing a definition for each category of methods. We define applied therapy as techniques or procedures involving physical and manual contact with the individual that are aimed at restoring health and preventing illness. Primary methods describe therapies which when used individually can impact the vital force of the body in order to preserve or restore health, while supportive methods describe therapies used in conjunction with primary methods intended to augment or create a synergistic and enhanced effect, exceeding that of primary methods alone. Our work provides a fundamental step in continuing the evolution of the TAIM conceptual model and advancing our understanding of the diverse practices under the rubric of applied therapy. Researchers can use this comprehensive TAIM taxonomy for investigating the respective elements, and systematically exploring the theoretical and therapeutic applications.

An emergent affliction in today’s Egypt

This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary Egypt: wahm, meaning (self-)illusion, locally defined as the condition of being falsely convinced one is possessed by spirits called ‘jinn’, all the while exhibiting real possession symptoms. As I show, wahm transcends the domain of revivalist Islamic healing from where it originates by mobilizing and entangling Islamic and psy concepts and practices. It both exploits the local dichotomy of jinn afflictions/mental disorders and grows from the cracking of this binary. In this manner, wahm provides a new idiom for critiquing current therapeutic practices, for understanding suffering, and for analyzing modern life in today’s Egypt. Through the analysis of wahm, this article contributes to scholarly investigations of ontology and the emergence of diseases by moving the lens from biomedical categories to the terrain where biomedicine meets religious healing, highlighting not only intersections but also the new formations they engender.

Loud ethics and quiet morality among Muslim healers in Eastern Africa

The professional ethics of biomedicine in Eastern Africa are usually sharply distinguished from the everyday moral concerns of patients, who may interpret healthcare treatment differently from their doctors. Biomedical doctors’ pronouncements adhere to the ethical demands of formal training, while ordinary people form their own moral ideas about biomedicine, with the two discourses meeting only during medical-moral crises. The voice of biomedicine, therefore, is metaphorically loud compared with that of everyday talk. This hegemonic duality of biomedicine is less evident in traditional Islamic healing, where patients sometimes negotiate the moral implications of sickness with their healers, and where Islamic medical ethics may be transmitted to younger apprentices interpersonally through life histories and narrative. The differences in volume between healers’ and patients’ moral voices are thus less pronounced, though not absent. Nevertheless, both are subject to the higher authority of Islam, whose holy texts and clerics are the final arbiters of the symptoms, cause and consequences of sickness. It is speculated that the emerging power, influence and stronger voice of radical Wahhabism could create a hegemonic medical ethical duality based more strictly than at present on religiously prescribed practice.