Islam, Medicine, and Healing

Catalog description

This course explores the intersections of religion and medicine in multiple Muslim contexts. Drawing on several disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, history, gender studies, and religious studies, it investigates how questions of health, healing, and illness have been addressed from premodern patterns to colonial and post-colonial transitions to the present. We will examine how different approaches to spirituality, law, and science congeal and compete in the sites of the human body, animals, food, medicines, and hospitals. From traditional healing practices to contemporary bioethics, the course considers how religion and medicine have been constituted, lived, and experienced.