This book traces the Islamic healing tradition's interaction with Indian society and politics as they 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. This is a pioneering work on the social and medical history of Indian Islam.

, Praying for health is a significant Islamic custom alongside seeking medical treatment, and has become a vital part of Muslim culture. There are two areas of focus in this book: the methodology and criteria of praying for health, and the results of a study on the effect of prayer on Muslim patients' well-being. This study was conducted at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate in Boston, MA. Twenty-Five Remedies, a work by prominent contemporary Muslim scholar Said Nursi, included in this book, further enriches the scope of the subject of prayer and healing. ,

""[I]t is extremely salubrious to see the ways Islam works in the lives of ordinary people who are not politicized in their religious lives.... No other book on South Asia has material like this."" --Ann Grodzins Gold In Amma's Healing Room is a compelling study of the life and thought of a female Muslim spiritual healer in Hyderabad, South India. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger describes Amma's practice as a form of vernacular Islam arising in a particular locality, one in which the boundaries between Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are fluid. In the ""healing room,"" Amma meets a diverse clientele that includes men and women, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian, of varied social backgrounds, who bring a wide range of physical, social, and psychological afflictions. Flueckiger collaborated closely with Amma and relates to her at different moments as daughter, disciple, and researcher. The result is a work of insight and compassion that challenges widely held views of religion and gender in India and reveals the creativity of a tradition often portrayed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as singular and monolithic.

Here, Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart offer a vigorous and authoritative exploration of the link between Islam and shamanism in contemporary Muslim culture, examining how the old practice of shamanism was combined with elements of Sufism in order to adapt to wider Islamic society. Shamanism and Islam thus surveys shamanic practices in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, to show how the Muslim shaman, like his Siberian counterpart, cultivated personal relations with spirits to help individuals through healing and divination. It explores the complexities and variety of rituals, involving music, dance and, in some regions, epic and bardic poetry, demonstrating the close links between shamanism and the various arts of the Islamic world. This is the first in-depth exploration of 'Islamized shamanism', and is a valuable contribution to the field of Islamic Studies, Religion, Anthropology, and an understanding of the Middle East more widely.

This book seeks to define, redefine and identify indigenous and traditional healing in the context of North American and Western European health care, particularly in counseling psychology and psychotherapy.

This rich ethnographic study describes the nearly impossible challenge of the daily existence of women in the poor neighbourhoods of Cairo. When these women fall ill they often put the blame on beings from an invisible world that invaded their body (possession), and they seek the help of traditional healers in the Zar ceremony or Koran healing. This book examines in detail the links between cosmology, power and gender. It tackles questions such as ‘what is possession, what is being said with it, and what does society have to do with it?’. The author, who lived a long time in various poor areas of Cairo, attended many sessions of Koran healing and participated in the Zar ceremony. She observed and interviewed many possessed women, as well as healers and other ‘demon specialists’.