Islam and Medicine in the Medieval Indian Ocean World

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways Muslim scholars made medical knowledge address their local needs across the medieval western Indian Ocean littoral. I attend to the many meanings of medicine (ṭibb) in texts written in specific places: Egypt, Yemen, and Gujarat-Rajasthan. I disaggregate the term “medieval Islamic medicine” by exploring regions not usually studied together in the history of that tradition. In each of these places, ṭibb included varied ways of knowing the body, from Galenic and Ayurvedic medicine to talismanic healing and the remedies used by the Prophet Muhammad or local revered teachers. This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of ṭibb as one coherent tradition with many local lives through the metaphor of ṭibb as an “ocean of knowledge.” I highlight the central role of place in shaping ṭibb, and the ways that ṭibb too shaped conceptions of space and bodies in place. By studying nearly one hundred manuscripts of medical texts written by physicians and religious scholars (ulema), I attend to local uses and names of materia medica and regional intellectual trends. These medical texts written by physician and non-physician authors show how varied their temporalities and epistemologies of medical knowledge could be, even within a tradition that each author identified as medicine. This thesis contributes to the global history of science and medicine and the history of the body in Islam, weaving together these fields’ shared interests in embodiment, geographies of pedagogy, and networks of knowledge production.