Book: Islam And Healing Indo-Muslim medicine—or the Unani tradition—developed in South Asia alongside Mughal political culture. While it healed the body, it also had a profound bearing on the social fabric of the region. Seema Alavi’s book shows the nature and extent of this Islamic healing tradition’s interaction with Indian society and politics from roughly 1600 to 1900. Drawing on Persian texts for the pre-colonial phase, Alavi then moves beyond the standard colonial archive to deploy unused Urdu texts, pamphlets, local newspapers, and private family records. The result is a substantial revision of the existing historiography of Indian Islam’s encounter with Western medicine. This book represents, in fact, the first major effort at telling the story of an Islamic healing tradition and its subsequent transformation by locating it within both pre-colonial and colonial time frames. Alavi shows precisely how, in the period of high colonialism, established practitioners kept their tradition alive. Their struggles to preserve and recast the Mughal legacy, control knowledge, and consolidate doctrinaire languages of power when confronting print culture and Western education are compellingly documented and analysed. Without disprivileging the state, she demonstrates how an in-house struggle for hegemony can be as potent as external power during processes that define medical, social, and national modernity. In the present context, where West-dominant globalization demonizes both Islam and cultural alternatives, the implications of this book are profound. A pioneering work on social and medical history, it will interest all historians, students of Islam’s interaction with the West, alternative modernities, and the ancient as well as contemporary struggle of the local against the global.
Book Reviews of Islam And Healing
Prophetic Medicine is not Unani Review by dr shafi abdulla zuhooriThank God !
really this is a valuable gift from his wisdom.
but, there is some missed understanding areas also in this book about the explenation of greeko-islamic medicine.
prophetic/islamic medicine is a seperste part from unani like medical systems
we can read about this fact from our website-zuhoorihealing.com
Prophetic Medicine is not Unani
Arabs were the motivation behind European renaissance. That mainly centred upon the revival of the legacy of Greco-German Philosophy. Some of the short sighted and religious blinded rulers in Rome started burning books that contained Greek philosophy and it was the Arabs who prevented them from the wicked act and saved the books. It was from the Arabs that the Europeans got these books which had later on become the foundation for European renaissance. It was not in full recognition of its worth that the Muslim Arab world showed so much of enthusiasm towards Greek philosophy. Especially many of its views on man and universe were not suitable for Islam. It was especially so in the case of Medical Science. Even today Greek medicine by the name Unani prevails in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Malaysia. There are even Muslim scholars who practise this system of medicine. Therefore many people mistake Unani medicine for Islamic medicine. A reconciled term, 'Unani Arabic Medicine' is being popularised in many places. Still it cannot therefore be called Islamic Medicine. If a great scholar of Islamic jurispridence runs an interest-based bank, it cannot be called an Islamic bank! It is the case with Unani Medicine. Many of its fundamental principles are not in conformity with the therapeutic, physiological and pathological principles laid down by Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of Allah be on him); though in many respects these are close to one another.
The Prophetic traditions related to medicine clearly define the latest critical diseases and also those that would follow immediately as well as those which would afflict mankind in future. His sacred words have touched upon all drugs and treatments. BIMS or Bachelor of islamic Medicine is a course on the post modern and comprehensive study of this sytem of treatment.
Details of Book: Islam And Healing Book: Islam And Healing
Author: Alavi S
ISBN: 8178241951
ISBN-13: 9788178241951
, 978-8178241951
Binding: Hardcover
Publishing Date: 2007
Publisher: Orient Blackswan Pvt Ltd.
Number of Pages: 400