A Sovereign and Virtuous Body

The Competent Muslim Woman's Guide to Health in Thanawi's Bihishtī Zēwar (1905)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2109302
AutoresBarbara D Metcalf (0000-0001-9449-0204, University of California, Davis, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen64
Número4
Páginas966-993
Fecha de publicación2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417522000342
OpenAlexW4293553764
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas20

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

Context (archaeology) · Craft · Elite · Ethnic group · Hinduism · Islam · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Traditional medicine · Anthropology · Families in Therapy and Culture · Gender Studies · History · History of Emotions Research · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Religious studies