I noticed that some readers of my recent posts insist on misreading them. Nowhere do I deny the spiritual dimension or that the reality of the human being goes far beyond what the materialist conception wants to assert. I also don’t demand that the soul be measured under a microscope. As I said in my previous post, this is *not* about spiritual development using Dhikr or Allah ﷻ’s Words’ impact on the heart or the body. We are talking about medical treatment and public health. My concern is with Muslims who take on the practice of alternative medicine today and promote it as a return to the “Islamic” way of doing medicine, using Islamic language to promote concepts conjured up by pagans and pantheists of old. There’s a world of difference between using local culture and cosmological language to expound an Islamic metaphysics, something someone like Sachiko Murata does quite beautifully in The Tao of Islam, and using Islamic language to justify the adoption of Greek and Hindu mythology in what’s being promoted as “Islamic” medical practice and “holistic” health. To repeat myself, this is *not* a blanket rejection of alternative medicine or holistic health practices as such. This is about framing them as “Islamic” while taking on their metaphysics.
The question remains, why is there a need to repackage these concepts as Islamic and go further by contrasting them with mainstream medicine and claim them to be the only authentic way of going back to *our* roots when their historical record shows otherwise?
You don’t need to make it Islamic to use something beneficial found in other cultures and civilizations. You don’t need to redefine terms used by pagan and pantheistic traditions to make them sound Islamic and therefore legitimate them as acceptable for a Muslim practitioner/audience while in practice retain what they originally signified. Let’s not fall back onto rhetorical tools and semantics. Take what has demonstrable and *verifiable* material benefit without repackaging it as Islamic, and reject that which is based on claims about the Unseen and has no support in the Quran or Sunnah. This shouldn’t be controversial to say (or accept) for a Muslim.
If one looks into the history of vitalism or its analogues in other cultures, it quickly becomes evident these doctrines are either elusive to define at best, or have gone through multiple iterations over time that qualitatively changed what they indicated at worst. You also find the concept gets some relative stability in how it’s used for a while, then a prominent philosopher comes along and challenges the convention, which leads to a change in how it’s used for another while. Rinse and repeat. What this shows about these terms is they’re essentially deficient attempts by human beings without access to Revelation to explain the nature of life manifesting through what otherwise would be inanimate entities if they were to exist at all.
مَثَلُهُمْ كَمَثَلِ ٱلَّذِى ٱسْتَوْقَدَ نَارًا فَلَمَّآ أَضَآءَتْ مَا حَوْلَهُۥ ذَهَبَ ٱللَّهُ بِنُورِهِمْ وَتَرَكَهُمْ فِى ظُلُمَـٰتٍ لَّا يُبْصِرُونَ
Their example is that of one who kindled a fire, but when it illuminated what was around him, Allah took away their light and left them in darkness [so] they could not see.
صُمٌّۢ بُكْمٌ عُمْىٌ فَهُمْ لَا يَرْجِعُونَ
Deaf, dumb and blind – so they will not return [to the right path]. [Quran 2:17-18]
A point often brought up is there’s a common thread that runs through all the different alternative medicine versions. Isn’t that supportive for its reality?
There are two main reasons similarities exist between different cultures in the way they describe the Unseen, albeit often with deification of either Nature as they describe its “healing force”, or the self as they describe “channeling the life force within”:
1. Allah ﷻ created us with an inherent ability to recognize that the material is a sign pointing beyond itself to a grand reality
فَأَقِمْ وَجْهَكَ لِلدِّينِ حَنِيفًا ۚ فِطْرَتَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلَّتِى فَطَرَ ٱلنَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا ۚ لَا تَبْدِيلَ لِخَلْقِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ ٱلدِّينُ ٱلْقَيِّمُ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ
So be steadfast in faith in all uprightness ˹O Prophet˺—the natural Way of Allah which He has instilled in ˹all˺ people. Let there be no change in this creation of Allah. That is the Straight Way, but most people do not know. [Quran 30:30]
2. No community has existed on this planet except it received a Message
إِنَّآ أَرْسَلْنَـٰكَ بِٱلْحَقِّ بَشِيرًا وَنَذِيرًا ۚ وَإِن مِّنْ أُمَّةٍ إِلَّا خَلَا فِيهَا نَذِيرٌ
Indeed, We have sent you with the truth as a bringer of good tidings and a warner. And there was no nation but that there had passed within it a Warner. [Quran 35:24]
وَلَقَدْ أَرْسَلْنَا رُسُلًا مِّن قَبْلِكَ مِنْهُم مَّن قَصَصْنَا عَلَيْكَ وَمِنْهُم مَّن لَّمْ نَقْصُصْ عَلَيْكَ ۗ وَمَا كَانَ لِرَسُولٍ أَن يَأْتِىَ بِـَٔايَةٍ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ فَإِذَا جَآءَ أَمْرُ ٱللَّهِ قُضِىَ بِٱلْحَقِّ وَخَسِرَ هُنَالِكَ ٱلْمُبْطِلُونَ
We already sent messengers before you. We have told you the stories of some of them, while others We have not. It was not for any messenger to bring a sign without Allah’s permission. But when Allah’s decree comes, judgment will be passed with fairness, and the people of falsehood will then be in ˹total˺ loss. [Quran 40:78]
However, these messages became corrupted and/or lost over time, and subsequent generations picked up various beliefs and/or superstitions either without epistemic foundations in Revelation since they lost access to theirs, or with retention of some truth that was distorted over time. The human desire to explain the nature of life remained and there was no shortage of attempts to do so with Revelation or without it. Messengers were sent again and again to return people to the Path, with the final one being the Beloved ﷺ who brought us the Quran to be the Criterion by which we distinguish what is True from what false.
One can go down an elaborate classification scheme and produce a framework with multiple categories for what human experience entails in terms of their health to give the impression of sophistication or complexity. However, when it comes to the practitioners of alternative medicine who wish to market themselves as practitioners of “Islamic” medicine, it comes down to addressing a simple point: things that exist are either material or immaterial. If they’re material, they must be measurable and objectively verifiable. If they’re immaterial but have a material impact, two conditions must be fulfilled for us to accept their adoption within an Islamic metaphysics of medicine:
1. They’re of the Unseen. Hence, you must produce clear evidence from the Quran and Sunnah for their existence and support for what you’re doing with them in your medical practice. Otherwise, you’re speaking about that which you have no knowledge of
2. If their impact is measurable despite their nature being immaterial and not directly measured, we should be able to empirically verify the impact you claim they have on one’s health outcomes
Take the power of breath for example. There’s a type of fast, irregular heartbeat that can result from a problem in the electrical conduction system of the heart. One treatment often used in the Emergency Department involves an intense breathing technique called the Valsalva manoeuvre (check YouTube if interested to see how it’s done). This manoeuvre works by triggering a physiological response to get the heart back into a regular rhythm. How do we know this? Anatomy, physiology, and doing the studies to delineate its four phases the body goes through as it’s performed. Now, you can propose that what you’re doing with this manoeuvre is channeling the Vital Force or sinking the Qi or aligning the Chakras to bring the patient’s heart rate into regular rhythm, and then tell us this force is immeasurable but to trust you because you’ve been granted some special opening from Allah ﷻ to understand the deep realities of the Fitra, effectively closing off any means to verify your claims in an objective way. What we’re left with then is to just take your word for it.
A comment to my previous post demonstrates this really well:
“As a fabricated example, if we have a traditional model of medicine that explains scurvy as being caused by evil spirits and says that citrus fruits treat it because they ward off evil spirits… we can still affirm the therapeutic potential of this accepted substance, even if denying the proposed pathophysiology. It may even be that the certain terms from the suggested pathophysiological model seem farfetched, but are actually found to always or very frequently correlate with an alternative term used in modern medicine. Using the analogy above, perhaps this traditional model referred to nutrient deficiencies as evil spirits, and so they had established the therapeutic nature of the substance for the disease but just failed to properly establish the specific underlying mechanisms.”
Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) was a German physician who proposed the existence of something he called “animal magnetism”. He claimed there’s a natural energy getting transferred between animate and inanimate objects. He proposed this happens through an invisible fluid found in the human body and nature, and that it has an impact on human health through the laws of magnetism and the presence of “obstacles” in the fluid’s flow throughout the body. The treatment involved a number of rather elaborate and dramatic moves Mesmer would conduct with his arms and body to trigger a state of trans or even convulsions in the patient to “break” these obstacles and restore them to wellness. The term “mesmerize” comes from this doctor who was quite successful with patients most susceptible to the power of suggestion. No invisible fluid or “obstacles” were ever found and the attempts to verify his claims were met with failure. After all, the fluid was *invisible*.
May Allah ﷻ grant us the opening to prefer His Words and the Beloved ﷺ‘s Sunnah than any constructs masquerading as Islamic anything.
