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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2022
Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi, a reformist Islamic scholar, was very much part of his times in his urgent concern with women’s potential role in individual and societal “improvement,” the goal of the enormously successful encyclopedic work that included the chapter considered here. Thanawi’s teachings included generic elite male “best practices” on health and ethics, undergirded by Greco-Arabic humoral medicine in its Indian form. His text caught a historical moment when medical treatments were more craft than industrial, and when the professionalization of discrete Muslim and Hindu “systems” of Unani Tibb and Ayurveda, with Ayurveda increasingly incorporated into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, was only incipient. Health maintenance in Thanawi’s hands was a matter of empowering women to both spiritual and practical competence and responsibility, freeing them from resort to (as he saw it) quacks, ignorant midwives, and untrained women, along with dubious healers and holy men, Muslim or Hindu or any other. In its description of challenges, strategies, and resources related to health, his text offers a window into women’s everyday world. But it also raises comparative questions about the history of medicine, the history of emotions, ethnicity in a colonial context, and the potentially empowering implications of Islamic socio-religious reform for women.
Acknowledgments: With thanks to Managing Editor David Akin and the anonymous CSSH reviewers, as well as to Sandria Freitag, David Gilmartin, Razak Khan, David Lelyveld, Thomas Metcalf, Neshat Quaiser, and Laurel Steele. And for long ago help, Dr. S. Ausaf Ali and Hakim M. A. Razzack, in memoriam.
1 In this chapter I use the earliest edition held by the British Library, Maulāna Maulawī Hājjī Muhammad Ashraf `Alī Thānvī, Bihishtī Zēwar Hissā Nuhum (The jewelry of paradise part nine) (Lakhnaū: Matba`-i Mujtabā’ī, n.d.), bound with the other separately published pamphlets that together comprise this work. It is catalogued as Hāfiz Muhammad Ashraf `Alī Bihishtī Zēwar (Sadhaura 1905). Later versions of the Urdu text are readily available online. The only scholarly translation omits this chapter: `Ali Thanawi, Ashraf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, A Partial Translation and Commentary, Metcalf, Barbara Daly, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar. For Thanawi and his Deobandi reformist thought, see Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, Ashraf `Ali Thanawi: Islam in Modern South Asia (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007)Google Scholar. For the importance of “Protestant” style reform in colonial India, see Francis Robinson, “Islam and the Impact of Print in South Asia,” in Crook, Nigel, ed., The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History and Politics (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1996), 62–97 Google Scholar.
2 Hatcher, Brian, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
3 Thanvī, Bihishtī Zēwar Pahlā Hissā (The jewelry of paradise part one), 1, my emphasis.
4 Thanawi, Perfecting Women, 49.
5 Tibb-i Ihsānī (Ihsan’s medicine), an authoritative and widely disseminated late nineteenth-century work on Avicennian humoral theories, as noted in Attewell, Guy, “Yunani Tibb and Foundationalism in Early 20th Century India: Humoral Paradigms between Critique and Concordance,” in Horden, Peregrine and Hsu, Elisabeth, eds., The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 133–34Google Scholar; and Alavi, Seema, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar, 224–28; and Makhzan al-mufradāt (A treasury of simples), noted in an undated edition from Lahore in Claudia Preckel, “Cinnabar, Calomel and the Art of Kushtasāzī: Mercurial Preparations in Unani Medicine,” ASIA 69, 4 (2013): 901–32, 932. Thanawi also lists Shifā’l-`alīl (Cure of the sick), very likely the fourteenth-century text by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, which deals with moral issues, a reminder of health’s broad compass. Thanawi, Perfecting Women, 378.
6 Thanawi elsewhere took up the emotional implications of this difference, for example women’s cool nature turning their anger into cold malice rather than men’s anger becoming hot fury; he urged similar strategies to control both, like the use of intellect and the cooling effect of water. Pernau, Margrit, “Male Anger and Female Malice: Emotions in Indo-Muslim Advice Literature,” History Compass 10, 2 (2012): 119–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Chatterjee, Partha, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Sangari, K. and Vaid, S., eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990), 233–53Google Scholar.
8 Maarten Bode applies Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “the social life of things” to illuminate the shifting “image” of traditional medicine in India; Taking Traditional Knowledge to the Market: The Modern Image of the Ayurvedic and Unani Industry, 1980–2000 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2008).
9 For generalizations about printed books on tibb in this period as “Islamicizing” (but descriptions of two texts that implicitly belie that), see Alavi, Islam and Healing, 223–36.
10 Nor should it be described as “reaffirm[ing] the legitimacy of unānī medicine;” “preserving … the heritage of Muslim medicine;” or “encourag[ing] Muslim religious identity challenged by alien cultures.” Vanzan, Anna, “Medical Education of Muslim Women in Turn-of the-Century India: The 9th Chapter of the Bihishtī Zewar ,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 48, 1 (2000): 3–8 Google Scholar.
11 Others, including myself in an earlier publication, provide the label “Unani Tibb” that Thanawi does not: Thanawi, Perfecting Women, 10; Attewell, Guy N. A., Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007)Google Scholar; Ansari, Usama Yasin,“ Tandrusti Deen ka Kaam Hai: Health as a Matter of Religion in Book 9 of Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s Bahishti Zewar ,” History of Religions 52: 1 (2012): 49–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vanzan, “Medical Education”; Laurel Steele, “Curing the Body and Soul: Health, Food, and Herbal Medicines for Nineteenth-Century South Asian Muslim Women,” in Kumar, Nita and Sanyal, Usha, eds., Food, Faith, and Gender in South Asia: The Cultural Politics of Women’s Food Practices (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 31–54 Google Scholar.
12 In a previous chapter on model women, Thanawi included eighth-century Baghdadi practitioners of hikmat (wisdom, medicine); Perfecting Women, 293. This term seems to finesse the growing Tibb-Ayurveda distinction, for example in an interwar journal (Hikmat) that distinguished two distinctive, non-competitive systems, or in “the unorganized but often contesting presence of popular medical culture, variously termed as Sanyasiana, Sanyasi Hikmat, or Fakiri Hikmat” in Punjab. Sivaramakrishan, Kavita, Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab (1850–1945) (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006), 232–34Google Scholar.
13 Manfred Ullman, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), esp. ch. 2. For a study of a thirteenth-century text on Indian physicians and their works, see Khan, M. S., “An Arabic Source for the History of Ancient Indian Medicine,” Studies in History of Medicine 3, 1 (1979): 1–12 Google Scholar.
14 Martin Levey, The Medical Formulary of Aqrābādhīn of Al-Kindī (1966), cited by Alok Kumar and Scott L. Montgomery, “Islamic Science’s India Connection,” in AramcoWorld (Sept.–Oct. 2017): 23; and Stewart Gordon, “Unani: Medicine’s Greco-Islamic Synthesis,” in AramcoWorld (Mar.–Apr. 2014): 34.
15 Fabrizio Speziale, “The Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge in Indo-Persian Medical Literature” (presented at the symposium “Ayurveda in Post-Classical and Pre-Colonial India,” Leiden, July 2009), in HAL, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00584749 (accessed 26 May 2020). For the eclectic use of Sanskrit texts in Sultanate-era works, see Muhammed `Abd al-Wahhab Zahoori, “The Achievements of the Indian Physicians,” Studies in History of Medicine 3, 1 (1979): 49–68. Muslim courts patronized Ayurveda, and Hindu royalty supported tibb. Bode, Taking Traditional Knowledge, 7. See also Eaton, Richard, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 387–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 William Sleeman’s list of subjects culminates in three texts on medicine: “[Like] the young man raw from Oxford—[the Muslim student] will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna….” William Sleeman, Rambles and Reflections of an Indian Official (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), II, 283.
17 See Siddiqi, Tazimuddin, “Two Eminent Physicians (of Unani Medicine) during Shah Jahan’s Reign,” Indian Journal of History of Science 16, 1 (1981): 26–30.Google ScholarPubMed
18 Speziale, “Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge,” 1.
19 Traced in Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb; and Sivaramakrishnan, Old Potions. The quotation is from Saurav Kumar Rai, “Invoking ‘Hindu’ Ayurveda: Communalisation of the Late Colonial Ayurvedic Discourse,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 56, 4 (2019): 411–26, 413. See also Alter, Joseph S., “Rethinking the History of Medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, 4 (2008): 1165–86, 1166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 It has found “new institutional recognition” in Iran as Iranian Traditional Medicine or (ITM). Fabrizio Speziale, “Linguistic Strategies of De-Islamization and Colonial Science: Indo-Muslim Physicians and the Yûnânî Denomination,” International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter 37 (2005): 18.
21 The Deobandi label is better known today for the socio-political visions of the Taliban. For the diversity of “Deobandis” beyond these foundational teachings on grassroots individual reform, see Barbara D. Metcalf, “‘Traditionalist’ Islamic Activism,” Immanent Frame, 7 Sept. 2011, https://tif.ssrc.org/2011/09/07/traditionalist-islamic-activism/ (accessed 30 Oct. 2021).
22 The modernist author Hali used the same metaphor of decline as a neglected disease in his 1879 poem that swept the “Urdusphere.” Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam, Christopher Shackle and Javed Majeed, trans. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
23 Thanawi, Perfecting Women, 47–48.
24 On this transition, see Stephens, Julia, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Ingram, Brannon, Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
26 For the Indian contribution to colonial medicine, see Alavi, Islam and Healing, chs. 2–4; and Mark Harrison, “Introduction,” in Bisamoy Pati and Mark Harrison, eds., Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001), 37–87. On specific products discovered in India, see Siegel, Benjamin, “Beneficent Destinations: Global Pharmaceuticals and the Consolidation of the Modern Indian Opium Regime, 1907–2002,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 57, 3 (2020), 327–62, 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Alavi, Islam and Healing, ch. 5.
28 The sociologist Neshat Quaiser identifies medicine as “the most potent area where sentiments against the claims of superiority of Western knowledge were articulated”; “Science, Institution, Colonialism: Tibbiya College of Delhi, 1889–1947,” Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, 1784–1947 (Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2010), 527. For novelistic delight in tibbī superiority in the Elizabethan age, see Phillips, Arthur, The King at the Edge of the World (New York: Random House, 2020).Google Scholar
29 For this argument, see David Arnold’s classic study, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Also, Liebeskind, Claudia, “Arguing Science: Unani Tibb, Hakims and Biomedicine in India, 1900–1950,” in Ernst, Waltraud, ed., Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2002), 58–75 Google Scholar. For twentieth-century texts that use “critique and concordance” to accommodate tibbī humoral theories to biomedicine and to germ theory in particular, see Attewell, “Yunani Tibb,” 129–48.
30 David Hardiman, following Kenneth Zyssk and Domink Wujaastyk, in “Indian Medical Indigeneity: From Nationalist Assertion to the Global Market,” Social History 34, 3 (2009): 263–83. The reference is to Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
31 For a review of historiography, see Hardiman, “Indian Medical Indigeneity.”
32 As early as the 1860s, the Director of Public Instruction in the United Provinces described reprints of medical treatises from which “it would appear that the study of medicine is undergoing revival.” Mathew Kempson to Officiating Secretary to Government, Proceedings, 20 Feb. 1869. On this, also see Alavi, Islam and Healing, ch. 5. See the ad for the tibbī publications of Newal Kishore, that great print capitalist, in Muḥammad Akbar ibn Muḥammad Shāh Arzānī, T̤ibb-i Akbar-i Urdū (Lakhnaʼū: Mat̤baʻ-i Naval Kishor, 1910), 2–3, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:437225431$2i (accessed 4 Feb. 2021).
33 See Barbara D. Metcalf, “Nationalist Muslims in British India: The Case of Hakim Ajmal Khan,” Modern Asian Studies 19, 1 (1985): 1–28. On controversy over the College’s use of Urdu (the mulkī zabān as Ajmal Khan called it), see Muhammad Ajmal Dihlawi, al-Tā`ūn (Delhi, 1897), 2–3. For the vision of reform this treatise represents, see Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 57–65.
34 Attewell Refiguring Unani Tibb, 151, with ch. 4, “Desi Tibb: Reform and ‘National Medicine.’”
35 Neshat Quaiser labels the `Azizi reformers “purists,” in “Politics, Culture and Colonialism: Unani’s Debate with Doctory” in Waltraud Ernst, ed., Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2002), 334–35. Attewell on rivalry cites Alavi, Islam and Healing, 10; and Metcalf, “Nationalist Muslims”; Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 167. Alavi is the foremost historian of the `Azizi hakīms; Alavi, Islam and Healing, esp. ch. 7.
36 Quaiser, “Science, Institution, Colonialism, 241.
37 Sivaramakrishan, Old Potions, 149.
38 See Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, ch. 5, “Treating Women: Unani Tibb’s Engagement with Women.” At least one prince and the Delhi reformers opened tibbī educational institutions to women early in the century, in contrast to Thanawi’s encouragement of women to acquire tibbī expertise within the home.
39 On the controversy over (polluting) surgery, long delegated to barbers and others of lower status, see Sabrina Datoo, “Translating Medicine, Part I: An Interview with Roanne Kantor,” Synapsis G (6 Aug. 2018), https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2018/08/06/translating-medicine-part-i-introduction/. On homeopathy, see Sayyid Ahmad Khan, “Hōmyāpathī (A Lecture Given at the Opening of a Homeopathic Clinic and Dispensary, Banaras, 17 December 1867”), in Muhammad Imāmud dīn Gujrātī, ed., Mukammil majmū`a lekchur wa spēchiz, 1868–1898 (Lahore: Matbū`a-i mustafā’ī prēs, 1900), 50–63.
40 In Thanawi’s case, the implication of the title of the classic study of colonial medicine in India, Arnold’s Colonizing the Body, is misplaced,
41 Ahmad, Nazir, The Bride’s Mirror: A Tale of Life in Delhi Forty Years Ago (London: Henry Frowde, 1903), 2, 130 Google Scholar, https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-122914-2109?q=bride%27s+mirror (accessed 3 Sept. 2020). For Thanawi on Ahmad’s novels, see Perfecting Women, 379–80. Women’s journals also offered general advice on health. Minault, Gail, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109 Google Scholar; and Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 212–15.
42 Ibādat’s synonyms are ecumenical: bandagī, pujāpāt, bhaktī, and namāz (Farhang III, 262). Its usage is not simply “worship,” but extends to moral behavior; for example, widow remarriage, in Shah Jahan Begum, Tahzībun niswān wa tarbiyatul insān (Urdu Bazar, Gujranwala: Maktaba no`māniyya, 1970[1983–1984]), 187; and habits like hard work and frugality in Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 124 n39. Dīn’s synonyms include the Arabic īmān (belief, integrity) and the Sanskrit dharm (law, morality). Farhang, III, 313.
43 Thānvī, Bihishtī Zēwar Hissā Nuhum, 1.
44 The common Urdu terms are dam or khūn (blood, hot/wet), balgham (phlegm, cold/wet), safrā (yellow bile, hot/dry), and saudā (black bile, cold/dry). As a translation for tabī`at, Attewell suggests “dynamic force” (“Yunani Tibb,” 144). See also Quaiser, “Politics, Culture and Colonialism,” 329–30. The Ayurvedic system posits three elements, the Chinese five.
45 But an editor’s footnote in a later edition provides a more positive gloss on beef and meat, as well as a note discouraging the use of brass cooking vessels (traditionally preferred by Hindus), perhaps a reflection of the ever-sharpening Muslim social identity of the past century. Bihishtī Zēwar Mukammal Mudawwalā (n.d.), ch. 9, p. 6, note 1. The editor of the Journal of Pakistan Studies dates the third edition to 1925, in an editorial note. Vanzan, “Medical Education,” editor’s footnote, 4.
46 Attewell, Guy, “Yunani Tibb and Foundationalism in Early Twentieth-Century India: Humoral Paradigms between Critique and Concordance,” in Horden, Peregrine and Hsu, Elisabeth, eds., The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice (New Milford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 129–48, 144–45Google Scholar.
47 Mir Muhammad Husain’s Ali Akbar Husain, Scent in the Islamic Garden: A Study of Deccani Urdu Literary Sources (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 7, esp. 132–33.
48 “People who grow up [speaking Huehuetla Tepehua, for example] are better at detecting, discriminating and naming odors.” Brooke Jarvis, “What Can Covid-19 Teach Us about the Mysteries of Smell?” New York Times Magazine, 31 Jan. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/magazine/covid-smell-science.html (accessed 1 Feb. 2021).
49 Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 226.
50 Ch. 7, “On Comportment and Character.” Thanawi, Perfecting Women, 163–240, esp. 189–91. For the classical foundations of ethics and habitual practice, see Lapidus, Ira M., “Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam,” in Metcalf, Barbara D., ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 62–87 Google Scholar. For a case study on bodily culture and ethics, see Emma Flatt, “Young Manliness: Ethical Culture in the Gymnasiums of the Medieval Deccan,” in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, eds., Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 153–73.
51 Kugle, Scott, “The Brilliance of Hearts: Hajji Imdadullah Teaches Meditation and Ritual,” in Metcalf, Barbara D., ed., Islam in South Asia in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 212–24, 218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kugle, Scott, “The Heart of Ritual Is the Body: Anatomy of an Islamic Devotional Movement of the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Ritual Studies 17, 1 (2003): 42–60 Google Scholar.
52 Razak Khan, personal communication, 1 Feb. 2020. See, “on a taboo and contested” topic, “Why India Must Battle the Shame of Period Stain,” 28 May 2002, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52830427 (accessed 25 Nov. 2020). Translations into English may exclude the sections on menstruation, as they do, for example, in Bahishti Zewar [Heavenly ornaments], Mohammad Khan Saroham, trans. (New Delhi: Saeed International, 1997).
53 On the subject of embarrassment, Attewell adds that even before the da`i the woman should not be completely naked. Refiguring Unani Tibb, 203. This is, however, an emphasis added to the original edition, where there is no such prohibition.
54 Ibid., 205.
55 The term for this ailment does not appear in either standard dictionary, Platts or Steingass. Also see ibid., 224–37.
56 Texts circulating in India explained that the mobile womb impacts the heart, the seat of nafs, “the lower or animal-like self” (that contrasts with `aql, “reason”), and thus encourages irrational passions. Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 226–28.
57 Camran Nezhat et al., “Endometriosis: Ancient Disease, Ancient Treatments,” Fertility and Sterility 98, 6 (2012), https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(12)01955-3/fulltext (accessed 6 Apr. 2020).
58 Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 205.
59 A late twentieth-century Bangladeshi pamphlet provides moral justification for performing abortions: preservation of a woman’s honor (ijjat), a duty (faraz) meriting divine reward (sawab). Islam, Shamima, Indigenous Abortion Practitioners in Rural Bangladesh: Women Abortionists, Their Perceptions and Practices (Dacca: Women for Women, 1981), 53, 72 Google Scholar. The relevant hadiīh (like long-held European theory) makes three months the point when the fetus receives a soul.
60 Shah Jahan Begum, Tahzibun niswan, 166–67.
61 Louis Werner, “City of Pearls: Hyderabad,” Aramco World (Sept./Oct 1998): 10–19, 18, https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199805/city.of.pearls.htm.
62 Rosenberg, Charles E., “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 20, 4 (1977): 485–506, 498–99CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
63 In the spirit of avoiding medications, a distinguished American researcher recently invoked humoral theory to justify letting a fever run its course as part of a larger campaign against over-medication (“Hippocrates was right”); Jane E. Brody, “Why Are We So Afraid of Fevers?” New York Times, 12 Jan. 2021, which reports on Dr. Paul Offit’s study, Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/well/live/fever-benefits.html 11 Jan. 2021 (accessed 11 Jan. 2021).
64 Indeed, one criticism of traditional medicine in India today is that theory is given short shrift in favor of trials of discreet drugs and medications. Dr. P. Ram Manohar and others at the Symposium “Traditions and Technologies: Ethical Engagements and New Directions in the Study of South Asian Medicines” University of California, Berkeley, 4 April 2019, https://cstms.berkeley.edu/current-events/traditions-and-technologies-ethical-engagements-and-new-directions-in-the-study-of-south-asian-medicines/ (accessed 6/19/22). But see Elizabeth Grace Saunders, “What’s Your Temperament?” New York Times, 1 July 2019, who says to know one’s temperament, revealed by her questionnaire, allows a person “to work smarter and better.” Her choices: “excited sanguine,” “committed choleric,” “scrupulous melancholic,” “peaceful phlegmatic.”
65 Erin Connelly, “Getting Medieval on Bacteria: Ancient Books May Point to New Antibiotics,” Scientific American, 19 Apr. 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-medieval-on-bacteria-ancient-books-may-point-to-new-antibiotics/ (accessed 29 Jan. 2020). Also, Feris Jabr, “Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotics Crisis?” New York Times Magazine, 18 Sept. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/magazine/could-ancient-remedies-hold-the-answer-to-the-looming-antibiotics-crisis.html (accessed 17 Dec. 2020). At a popular level, Amazon yields some two thousand items for a search of “turmeric,” trending in recent years as a virtual cure-all: anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-microbal, https://www.amazon.com/s?k=turmeric&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 (accessed 21 July 2020).
66 Gordon, “Unani,” 36.
67 Perhaps the direction on nose holding is from a prophetic hadith: “When one of you drinks, then do not breathe into the vessel.” From Sahih Bukhari, cited at Sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:5630 (accessed 18 Nov. 2021).
68 Donne speculated that his excess vapors (black bile, cold and dry, understood as the cause of melancholy) resulted from his thinking and studying. From Gosse, Edmund, The Life and Letters of John Donne (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 182, 186 Google Scholar, quoted in James Fenton, “Turgenev’s Banana,” New York Review of Books, 13 Feb. 2003: 46.
69 Similarly, princes apparently hunted so that their prey’s potency could be “harvested by the prince.” Hughes, Julie E., Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5 Google Scholar. As for the use of a chicken carcass, Europeans used a variation of the method described here, a live pigeon cut in two parts, as a plague remedy. Wall, Wendy, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 As was the case in European humoral theory. “[Europeans of the Middle Ages] conceived of [their bodies] through theories that have since been totally disproven to the point of absurdity but which nevertheless could not have seemed more vivid or logical….” Parnell, Jack, Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 13 Google Scholar.
71 A holy man, like Thanawi, was commonly regarded as more likely to effect a cure than would an ordinary hakīm. For empirical confirmation through MRI scans that religious faith mitigates the experience of pain, see Nicola Twilley, “Seeing Pain: Using Brain Imaging to Unravel the Secrets of Suffering,” New Yorker, 2 July 2018: 18–24.
72 Vanzan, “Medical Education,” editor’s footnote, 4.
73 Rattī: the seed of Abrus precatorius, a weight equal to eight barley corns (the seed weighs about 1 5/16 grains troy; tōlā now standardized as 180 troy grains (11.663, 8038 grams) or exactly 3/8 troy ounce; māshā, equal to eight rattīs (although sometimes reckoned as ten or five).
74 For the mid-century curriculum at Deoband, Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi lists five tibbī works—Sharh-i-Asbāb, Nafīsī, Qānūnchah, Mūjaz, Humiyyāt-i-Qānūn. He notes tibb as a way Deobandis earned a livelihood; The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 34, 40 n1.
75 Metcalf, Barbara D., Islamic Revival in British India (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982), esp. 191–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Ali Altaf Mian, “Surviving Modernity: Ashraf ‘Alī Thānvī (1863–1943) and the Making of Muslim Orthodoxy in Colonial India,” PhD diss., Graduate Program in Religion, Duke University, 2015, 30–31.
77 This was indeed the case with his teacher, Hakim `Abdul Majid, who was associated with the Aligarh movement, helped launch an Urdu journal about medicine, and in 1898 received a title from the British for his services. Zafar Ahmed Nizami, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Builders of Modern India (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1988), 9, https://archive.org/stream/hakimajmalkhan00niza?ref=ol#page/8/mode/2up/search/%60abdul+majeed (accessed 1 Sept. 2020).
78 Thanawi also wrote a complete book of a`māl, A`māl-i-Qur’ānī (Vanzan, “Medical Education,” 6), widely available in print and as a pdf: https://quranwahadith.com/product/amal-e-qurani/ (accessed 20 July 2020).
79 Farhang II (1974), 65. See also Ja`far Sharif, Islam in India or the Qānūn-i-Islām, or the Customs of the Musalmāns of India, William Crooke, ed. (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation 1972 [original 1832, edited version 1921]), chs. 27 and 28, for description of similar a`māl. An account of a contemporary woman healer in Hyderabad suggests that Thanawi’s inclusion of written a`māl, not just oral recitation, is noteworthy. Even at her recent date, this healer, addressing similar problems of infertility, sick children, and unkind husbands, was exceptional in issuing written incantations, since women in this city were typically limited to recitations. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter, In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2006), esp. 66, and ch. 2Google Scholar.
80 The secondary literature on Sitala is vast, but includes Nicholas, Ralph, Fruits of Worship: Practical Religion in Bengal (New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2003)Google Scholar; and Stewart, T. K., “Encountering the Smallpox Goddess: The Auspicious Song of Śītala,” in Lopez, D. S., Jr., ed., Religions of India in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 389–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 The fifteenth-century Latā'if-i Ashrafī of Ashraf Jahāngīr Semnānī included Sanskrit mantras against diseases. The Indian pharmacopoeias of Aman Allah Khan and Sharif Khan note anti-demoniac properties of several items. The Mughal emperor Akbar ordered the Atharvaveda translated into Persian; Speziale, “Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge,” 5. Examples of precolonial patronage of holy men and specialists of all traditions demonstrate not only paternalism but also prudent recognition of transcendent power. Metcalf, Barbara, “Religion and Governance in India—A Comment,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 33, 1 (2010): 1–12, 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
82 For a contemporary ethnographic study of the respective Hindu and Muslim visions of the inherent power at a saint’s tomb, but power in any case, see Van Der Veer, Peter, “Playing or Praying: A Sufi Saint’s Day in Surat,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, 3 (1992): 545–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 Steele, Claude, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).Google Scholar
84 L. Steele, “Curing the Body.”
85 The accounts of women missionaries and doctors, typically under the auspices of denominational zanana societies, propagated an image of the “cruel customs” and “social bondage” of Indian women’s domestic life. See, for example, the many writings of Emma Raymond Pitman, including Indian Zanana Missions: Their Need, Origin, Objects, Agents, Mode of Working and Results (London: John Snow, 1890), https://archive.org/stream/MN40255ucmf_6/MN40255ucmf_6_djvu.txt (accessed 2 Oct. 2021).
86 Some translations into English excerpt and rearrange segments of the chapter so that the overall argument is lost, for example, Bahishti Zewar [Heavenly ornaments], Mohammad Khan Saroha, trans. (New Delhi: Saeed International, 1997); and Bahishti Zewar, Moulana Muhammad Mohamedy, trans. (Azadville: Zam Zam, 1999). Ansari, “Tandrusti Deen ka Kaam Hai,” 56–57.
87 Speziale, Fabrizio, Soufisme, religion et médecine en Islam Indien (Paris: Karthala, 2010), 240 Google Scholar, quoted in review by Valdinoci, Mauro, Journal of Islamic Studies 23, 3 (2012): 381 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Speziale, Fabrizio, “The Relation between Galenic Medicine and Sufism in India during the Delhi and Deccan Sultanates,” East and West 53, 1 (2003): 149–78, 150Google Scholar. Speziale shows Sufis to have participated in advancing medical knowledge, not hindering it.
88 In one case, the text was actively used at least a few decades back. A Nepali Muslim urged the anthropologist Marc Gaborieau to cut short recording medical procedures by just reading their printed guide, Thanawi’s Chapter Nine. Nepalese banglemakers brought home the Bihishtī Zēwar and other reformist works after working in Indian cities following World War I. Marc Gaborieau, “The Transmission of Islamic Reformist Teachings to Rural South Asia,” in H. Elboudrari, ed., Modes de transmission de la culture reliigieuse en Islam (Le Caire: Institut français d’archéologie orientale), 119–57.
89 S. Ranganathan, “Rethinking the ‘Medical’ through the Lens of the ‘Indigenous,’” in Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N. A. Atttewell, Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 219–34 Quia, 220.
90 Kira Schmid Stiedenroth, “Reviving a Forgotten Sunna: Hijamah (Cupping Therapy), Prophetic Medicine, and the Re-Islamization of Unani Medicine in Contemporary India,” Contemporary Islam 13 (2019): 183–200. Thanawi discouraged bleeding and severe purges and emetics as potentially harmful.
91 See Ashok Nath, “Grandma’s Remedies,” India Perspectives (Dec. 2001): 16–18. This is a publication of the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. Hardiman quotes the celebrity guru Deepak Chopra, who touts Ayurveda as “the collective wisdom of sages,” in “Indian Medical Indigeneity,” 263.
92 This raises the related legal issue of indigenous intellectual property. For an example of discussions of this issue, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12821021 (accessed 12 Feb. 2021).
93 “…the traditional physician also lost the role of the diagnostician, therapist and the prescriber.” Bode, Taking Traditional Knowledge, 59, and ch. 4, for a discussion of the historic importance of the physician-patient relationship in humoral medicine.
94 Nandini Bhattacharya, “Between the Bazaar and the Bench: Making of the Drugs Trade in Colonial India, ca. 1900–1930,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90, 1 (2016): 61–91, 61, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5331622/ (accessed 28 Feb. 2020).
95 See Anna Vanzan, “Hamdard: How to Share Pain in a Muslim Way,” in Fabrizio Speziale, ed., Hospitals in Iran and India, 1500–1950s (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 215–29, 216–19. Hamdard was preceded by large-scale drug production in Bengal in the face of official policies that favored European producers. Anil Kumar, “Indian Drug Industry under the Raj, 1860–1920,” in Bisamoy Pati and Mark Harrison, eds., Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001), 356–82.
96 The name Rooh Afza (refresher of the soul) is that of the heroine of an Urdu-language poetic love story, Masnawī Gulzār-i Nasīm, written by a Brahmin from Lucknow, poem and author alike making for an object of “composite culture.”
97 Alter, “Rethinking the History.” A recent academic project under the direction of Maarten Bode investigates the efforts to make Ayurveda the framework for a range of local medical cultures; “Indian Medical Traditions between State and Village,” Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 13, 1–2 (2018), https://brill.com/view/journals/asme/13/1-2/article-p97_5.xml (accessed 8 Sept. 2020).
98 See Venera R. Khalikova, “Medicine and the Cultural Politics of National Belongings in Contemporary India: Medical Plurality or Ayurvedic Hegemony,” Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 13, 1–2 (2018): 198–221, https://brill.com/view/journals/asme/13/1-2/article-p97_5.xml (accessed 8 Sept. 2020). For the conflation of medicine with nationalism, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Bengali Ayurbed: Frames, Texts and Practices,” Calcutta Historical Journal 25, 2 (2005): 15–45, 15. Neshat Quaiser deplores “the complaining Yunani-Muslim subject,” a stance, he argues, that precludes any equal dialogue; “Tension, Placation, Complaint: Yunani and the Web of Post-Colonial Communalism,” in V. Sujatha and Leena Abraham, eds., Medical Pluralism in Contemporary India (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2012), typescript at: https://independent.academia.edu/NQuaiser (accessed 23 Mar. 2020).
99 For links to research, teaching, and drug production facilities it supports and regulates, see https://www.nhp.gov.in/unani_mty/ (accessed 30 Jan. 2020). See also the website of the AYUSH ministry, at http://ayush.gov.in/ (accessed 30 Jan. 2020). “Central Council on Indian Medicine” is the regulatory and developmental unit under the Ministry. Quaiser provides statistics for the number of Unani research centers, colleges, hospitals/dispensaries under government supervision in 2009 quoting Unani Medicine in India (Central Council for Research in Unani Medicine, New Delhi, 2009); Quaiser, “Tension, Placation, Complaint,” 130–64.
100 Stephan Kloos underlines the need to see Asian medicine as modern industries, not “traditional” cultures. He points out the greater success of the more centralized Chinese state compared to India in exporting “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (“TCM,” including acupuncture, diet, herbal therapy, meditation, physical exercise, and massage). Presentation to the symposium “Traditions and Technologies: Ethical Engagements and New Directions in the Study of South Asian Medicines,” at Berkeley’s Institute for South Asian Studies, April 2019.
101 Sivaramakrishnan, Old Potions, 117–18. In 2016, the AYUSH ministry announced, “Dhanteras to be observed as the National Ayurveda Day,” in Times of India, 30 Sept. 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/54599037.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst (accessed 28 May 2020).
102 “…today the global CAM [Complementary and Alternative Medicine] market requires Islamic medicine to satisfy Muslim consumers all over the world.” Stiedenroth, “Reviving a Forgotten Sunna,” 196, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11562-018-0426-x?shared-article-renderer (accessed 23 July 2020.)
103 Hamdard (India), http://www.hamdard.in/#:~:text=Nation%20Building,the%20benefit%20of%20all%20persons (accessed 11 Sept. 2013).
104 At http://hamdard.com/product/roohafza (accessed 7 Feb. 2021).
105 When in 2019 there was an international shortage of Rooh Afza, multiple news outlets described popular wistfulness for Rooh Afza’s use in Ramadans past. Bollywood films use the drink as a symbol of family bonds among Muslims. For example, in Yeh jawānī hai dīwānī, a son’s alienation and subsequent reconciliation with a step-mother is marked by his rejection, then acceptance, of the beverage from her hand. See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/rooh-afza-shelves-india-muslims-ramadan-crisis-190510100516290.html and https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/roof-azfa-shortage-hamdard-india-muslims-ramzan-1522304-2019-05-11 (accessed 11 Sept. 2020). See also Mayank Austin Soofi, “1907 [its inaugural date] Rooh Afza/Lal Salaam,” https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/dRicP6yOXBpHxAY6RYBTiP/1907-Rooh-Afza--Lal-salaam.html (accessed 29 Jan. 2021).
106 Bode, Taking Traditional Knowledge, 14–17.
107 See https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hamdard&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 for some of Hamdard’s most popular products (accessed 30 Jan. 2020).
108 He was leery of activism, even when other mainstream Deobandis participated in the nationalist movement, motivated by anti-imperialism, not by a program for a changed political or legal structure. Barbara D. Metcalf, Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and India’s Freedom (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008). The emphasis on grassroots, individual change is most visible in the transnational mass movement of Tablighi Jamaat, dating from the 1920s and derived from Deoband.
109 This was not a term for either “Indian Muslim” or “nation” in the debates of the day, where debates focused on qaum, millat, and watn.