In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt.

• Author: Ruano, Delfina Serrano

In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt. By KHALED FAHMY. Oakland: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2018. Pp. xiii + 377. $39.95.

In Quest of Justice investigates the introduction of forensic medicine, quarantines, and modern notions of public health and hygiene in Egypt of the khedival period (1805-1879), drawing on the rich collection of documents from the administrative (siyasa) councils. As we learn from Khaled Fahmy, this archive is unique for its comprehensiveness, its massive size, and the careful way it has been kept and organized. It is preserved at the Egyptian National Archives and has seldom been exploited, with very few exceptions such as Ruud Peters (p. 127). The documents selected for the present study offer a detailed picture of the actual implementation of Sharia, the functioning of the criminal system, and the interaction between the councils (majalis) and qddi courts. Even more interestingly, they open a window into nonelite Egyptians' engagement with modern medical and public hygiene practices and discourses.

Tested against a wide variety of other relevant legal and nonlegal sources, the analyzed documents have enabled Fahmy to question several preconceived ideas about nineteenth-century Egypt--inter alia, the rejection by Muslims (whether elite, middle-class, or lay) of science (i.e., post-mortem examinations, dissections, and autopsies); the conflict between Sharia and governmental justice (siyasa); the abrupt shift from a theocratic and sultanic political order to a modern secular state; European influence in the establishment of modern medical institutions and the adoption of modern scientific means of legal proof and public hygiene and health: and the role of European enlightenment in the shift from corporal punishment to prison penalties. The study of dissection and autopsy and a shift of attention from schools, newspapers, and printing presses toward cemeteries, slaughterhouses, and cesspools led Fahmy to rethink the category of modernity and to show that in the case of Egypt modernity relied on both medical and legal reform.

Fahmy reviews Egyptian studies on modern Egyptian medicine (pp. 7-15), which he finds reproduce Western stereotypes such as the despotism of the "uncivilized" Ottomans and the incompatibility between Islamic dogma and popular superstition on the one hand and modern medicine on the other. The book also challenges the bias of Islamist historiography, which denies the historicity of Sharia and presents modern Egyptian law as the victim of a Western attack on Muslim identity and cultural authenticity rather than as a stage in Sharia's historical evolution.

This study is organized in five chapters, preceded by an introduction and wrapped up with thirteen pages of conclusions. Following a Foucaultian line, Fahmy pays special attention to the corporeal aspects of the formation of the modern Egyptian state. He sees the human body as the product of hegemonic discourses on medicine and law as well as the scenario of the interplay of state power and nonelite resistance against it. The centrality of the human body explains his decision to organize the chapters around the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Chapter one, "Medicine, Enlightenment, and Islam," evokes the sense of sight to deal with the practice of autopsy and the introduction of anatomoclinical medicine in Egypt. Fahmy demonstrates that the establishment of Egypt's first modern medical institution by Mehmed 'All, i.e.. the Qasr al-'AynT medical school directed by the French doctor Clot Bey, responded primarily...