Soufisme, religion et medecine en Islam indien.

• Author: Miller, Ruth A.
• Position: Book review

Soufisme, religion et medecine en Islam indien. By FABRIZIO SPEZIALE. Paris: EDITIONS KARTHALA, 2010. Pp. 302. [euro]25 (paper).

In Soufisrne, religion et medecine en Islam indien, Fabrizio Speziale makes a compelling case that Sufis played a key role in the development and transmission of "Greek" (yfinani or "Avicennian") medical knowledge in India. The central figure of Speziale's story is the Sufi master or healer who was adept simultaneously in Muslim prophetic medicine (tibb-i nabawi) and in Greek medicine--the doctor who brought theories from both of these traditions to bear on the treatment of patients and on the elaboration of new therapies and new therapeutic philosophies. By devoting his book to this figure, Speziale makes an important contribution to work on Sufism and mysticism, to the history of science and medicine, and to South Asian Islamic studies broadly defined.

Most pointedly, Speziale argues against conventional wisdom concerning the apparent Sufi opposition to Greek medical study. Rather than assuming that Sufis--or religious Muslims generally--disapproved of the pagan origins of this medical tradition and thus ignored or condemned it, Speziale reads Sufi medical texts as, fundamentally, syncretic. That is to say, he reads them as works that brought Muslim prophetic and Greek medicine into conversation with one another and that thereby helped to circulate the latter throughout South Asia and the Persian-speaking world. In the process, Speziale demonstrates that case studies of medical theory and practice in regions like India are essential to the historical study of medicine and science writ large. As a place in which numerous intellectual traditions and belief systems interact, India provides convincing evidence of the necessarily dynamic and contingent nature of scientific study, especially in the medieval and early modern periods. Even more, by tracing the connections--via the transmission of medical knowledge--between Sufi orders in India and Sufi orders in other parts of the world, Speziale erases many of the arbitrary geographical boundaries that continue to divide the field of Islamic studies. The implicit comparative dimension of the book indeed becomes explicit when Speziale ends by asking whether his narrative's key figure--the Sufi master possessed of both Greek and prophetic medical knowledge--is or was unique to South Asia.Without being dogmatic, and without losing sight of the specific South Asian context, Speziale suggests that perhaps this figure was universal to Muslim science--as much at home in Cairo or Istanbul as he was in Hyderabad (p. 247).

To make these arguments, Speziale sets up for himself an ambitious geographical and chronological framework of inquiry. The book covers the thirteenth century to the present, encompassing Sufi orders throughout the Indian subcontinent (although the Deccan Plateau, and the Chishtis and Qadiris, receive the most thorough treatment). Speziale is, however, quite clearly capable of reaching this ambitious goal. Equally comfortable with scholarship on the medieval, early modern, and modern periods. Speziale addresses, for example, not only documents and monographs on pre-Mughal court history, but also debates within the field of colonial and post-colonial studies. His material includes Persian, Urdu, and Arabic medical treatises, healing...