Practicing the Prophet's Medicine: Health, Illness, and Islamic Therapeutics in Indonesia
Creators: name: Nolan-Thomas, Emma
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Islamic therapeutics
subject: Islamic healing
subject: Qur'anic healing (ruqya)
subject: Prophetic medicine
subject: cupping (hijama, bekam)
subject: religious experimentation
subject: History (General)
subject: Humanities (General)
subject: Religious Studies
subject: Southeast Asian and Pacific Languages and Cultures
subject: Anthropology and Archaeology
subject: Social Sciences (General)
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities
subject: Social Sciences

description: This dissertation examines emergent practices of “Islamic therapeutics” (pengobatan Islam) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. As everyday and embodied manifestations of Islamic revival movements, “Prophetic” and “Islamic” approaches to health, healing, and medicine have in recent decades been on the rise amongst Muslims around the world, with particular interest in cupping (Arabic: hijama, Indonesian: bekam), Qur’anic healing or therapeutic Qur’an recitation (Arabic: ruqya, Indonesian: ruqyah), and the use of herbal medicines. For Muslim Indonesians battling an epidemic of chronic diseases and skyrocketing healthcare costs, traditions of Islamic ethical self-formation in which Muslims strive to emulate the Prophet Muhammad’s model of humoral “balance” and moderation have become especially salient, and the field of Islamic therapeutics has become a key site of experimentation with religious and ethical approaches to cultivating healthy, virtuous selves. By bringing these practices into conjunction with biomedical treatments as well as Chinese and Javanese forms of traditional medicine, patients and practitioners go beyond reviving Islamic traditions to invent new synthetic approaches. In Indonesia, this revival has also taken place against a backdrop of deeper histories of interconnections between health and Islam, especially among “traditionalist” networks of Muslims. These networks, institutionalized in Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) have long included texts on health, medicine, and prayer, and many kyai, the leaders of pesantren, have been renowned for their healing abilities and practices. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia and the Netherlands, this dissertation traces diverse Indonesian Islamic approaches to the cultivation of health and the treatment of disease. In particular, it draws on extended fieldwork in four “healthy houses” (rumah sehat) in and around the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in which practitioners of Islamic therapeutics work with patients and teach workshops. Key interlocutors include both revivalist or Salafi and traditionalist Muslim practitioners of Islamic therapeutics, as well as both male and female practitioners and patients. In bringing together these diverse approaches to Islamic therapeutics, this dissertation contributes to broader understandings of Islamic traditions as heteroglossic, explorative, and dynamically engaged with ongoing forms of experience – embodied, empirical, and even experimental. I suggest that Islamic therapeutics are variously constituted through articulations of “tradition” (Prophetic, Islamic, ancestral) and “experience” (embodied, experimental, and empirical) directed toward a telos of human flourishing in the form of healthy Muslim personhood.