Medicine and Religious Scholarship
Medicine and Religious Scholarship
by Nahyan Fancy
A striking fact about the history of philosophy in the Islamic world is that so many of its protagonists were also doctors, or at least wrote on medical topics.
...medicine was by and large deemed a praiseworthy science by religious authorities in the pre-modern Islamic world. Many sayings attributed to the Prophet, his companions, Shiʿī Imāms, and subsequent jurists and theologians encourage Muslims to take active measures to stay healthy, as well as to seek out remedies when ill. Medicine was categorised by Sunnī jurists and theologians, such as al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), as a farḍ kifāyā (communal obligation), i.e. an obligation incumbent upon a sufficient number of individuals to look after the needs of the larger Muslim community (Rahman 1989, 38). The Qurʾān itself speaks of the use of honey for physical cures (16:68), and the Prophetic traditions expound on the curative features of honey and other ingredients, such as black cumin and Indian incense. In fact, the Prophet is also reported to have authorised the use of cupping and blood-letting – two standard medical practices of the Galenic tradition, which was the scientific medical tradition of that time (Bewley 2011, ch. 40, nos. 2157–2161, ch. 79, nos. 5356 ff. The fact that the efficacy of the cure was still dependent on God’s will did not deter people from seeking out cures; the faithful, which could include the physicians, the patients and their caregivers, sought God’s help and mercy in healing through prayers and invocations. For example, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 1448), who otherwise saw the plague as martyrdom and claimed that it was an affliction caused by the jinn, still advocated seeking God’s help through prayer to end the plague and to cure individual afflictions. His underlying conviction that believing in God’s decree is not incongruous with seeking out cures (physical or divine) was shared by many Sunnī jurists, the major exception being Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855) (Rahman 1989, 48; Stearns 2011, 85–89). And although some Sufi mystics decried medical cures, seeing them as incongruous with a reliance upon God (tawakkul), other Sufis even took part in the transmission and practice of medicine in Islamic societies (Perho 1995; Speziale 2010)...
Left: Inside the Divrigi hospital in Turkey.
The general attitude towards seeking medical assistance had a positive impact on medical practice in Islamic societies. Physicians, druggists, surgeons, and cuppers all operated as legitimate professionals providing vital services in these societies. Hospitals and public baths were built and accepted as legitimate forms of religiously-approved charity. Medical texts were housed, studied and copied in madrasas (higher institutions of religious learning) and their libraries, and even the existence of the famous medical madrasa of al-Dakhwār (thirteenth century) was not deemed problematic. The medical madrasas and hospitals, including the famous Manṣūrī hospital of Sultan Qalāwūn (r. 1279–1290), were religious endowments (waqfs), similar in form to the endowments that established conventional madrasas and other religious institutions (Rahman 1989).
Right:
Entrance of the Divrigi hospital in Turkey.
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"Medicine and Religious Scholarship" by Nahyan Fancy
~ Chapter Nineteen, Pages 176-185 ~
~ Chapter Nineteen, Pages 176-185 ~
1001 Cures Book tells the fascinating story of how generations of physicians from different countries and creeds created a medical tradition admired by friend and foe. It influences the fates and fortunes of countless human beings, both East and West.