Islam and Healing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 1-17

3. Indo-Muslim Medicine: Unani in Pre-modern India

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 18-53

4. Encounter with the West: The English East India Company

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 54-99

5. The Practice of Medicine: Public Welfare

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 100-153

6. Dispensaries and Shifakhaanas in Early-Nineteenth-Century India

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 154-204

7. Urdu Medical Texts in the Late Nineteenth Century

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 205-241

8. Argumentative Hakims: Debates in the Oudh Akhbar

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 242-290

9. From Jhawain-tola to Takmil-ut-Tibb, Lucknow

   • Seema Alavi

   Pages 291-333

10. Conclusion

    • Seema Alavi

    Pages 334-339

11. Back Matter

    Pages 353-384

    PDF

Traces the Islamic healing tradition's interaction with Indian society and politics as these evolved in tandem from 1600 to 1900, and demonstrates how an in-house struggle for hegemony can be as potent as external power in defining medical, social and national modernity. A pioneering work on the social and medical history of Indian Islam.

• 1900
• India
• Islam

'...a major contribution to our understanding of colonialism, and indigenous reactions.' Metascience

' The book is very informative [and] what imparts emotion to Alevi's scholarship is her obvious commitment to the fate of this descendant of ancient medicine.' The international Journal of Asian Studies

SEEMA ALAVI is Professor at the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Milia Islamia, Central University, New Delhi. She has twice been a Fulbright Fellow as well as a Smuts Fellow at Cambridge University, from where her PhD was revised and published as The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770-1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). She has co-authored (with Muzaffar Alam) A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Ijaz-I-Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of A.H. Polier (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). She has edited The Eighteenth Century in India, Oxford Debates Series (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. 

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