UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines interlocutors’ ideas of health and illness, as they have been inflected and intensified by the war in Yemen. My ethnography, based on 24 months of multi-sited field research, explores the demand for ‘afiya (physical, psychological, and spiritual wellness) and the human, as grounded in an Islamic cosmology. My fieldwork took place in university teaching hospitals, private hospitals, clinics, research centers, and mosques in three urban centers: Sana‘a, Yemen; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Amman, Jordan. As physicians, families, and imams are sought and become integrated into treatment plans, I argue that ‘afiya, rather than the patient, is the object of medical care, implicating a network of people in the alleviation of the illness. Unlike the vision of sihha (physical health), where illness must be destroyed utterly, under the rubric of ‘afiya, the illness becomes a trial and symptom open onto the experience of divine judgment (including of and on war, deprivation, and the migration and refugee crisis). This demand for ‘afiya among patients involved broader social advocacy for reform—of the body but also of the political, economic, and spiritual dimensions of the community. Physicians responded to this demand by their 1) engagement at the forefront of the 2011-2012 uprising in Sana‘a, Yemen; 2) work with refugees and migrants in Amman and Jeddah; and 3) clinical trials of Prophetic Medicine in Jeddah, arguing that evidence in medicine should show long-term benefits rather than short-term efficacy. This response was framed in the three field sites as a reform (islah) of medicine and a (re)introduction of the Islamic medical tradition to global medicine and health. Rather than the Orientalist narrative of a golden age followed by the decline of Muslim science, I argue that ethnography discloses a different historical perspective on physicians’ various positions with regard to the proper relationship of Islam to medicine, Islam to magic and astrology, and Prophetic Medicine to biomedicine. Each is part of a complex of engagements and arguments internal to the tradition regarding islah (reform and renewal). I locate these various arguments within the archive of Islamic scholarship concerning physics, cosmology, affinity, prognosis, the channels of God, and unknowledge (al-ghayb). Some of my interlocutors reconcile Islam and biomedicine; some call for a medicine grounded in Islamic thought and holistic form of a human with a soul; yet others distinguish medical efficacy from medical benefit. My dissertation rethinks the relationship between Islam and medicine through focusing on multiple scenes of “reform” where the binaries of tradition and development, local and global, fail to account for emergent realities.