A couple of things to highlight about “Islamic” medicine:
1. The historical record of Islamic medicine doesn’t refer to the practice being rooted in religious teachings. In fact, most physicians in the Islamic civilization were not even Muslim or Arab for that matter. Ibn Sina was a Persian Muslim. Abu Bakr ar-Rāzī was a Persian with a question mark about his theological beliefs given some dispute about writings in this topic that are allegedly attributed to him. Maimonides, the personal physician of Salah ad-Dīn al-Ayūbī, was a Jew. The Islamic civilization stretched from al-Andalus all the way to China. How *people* living in Muslim governed societies across that vast geographical space applied practices to improve their health and cure their illnesses varied to the degree they varied in their cultural and historical practices. Sometimes, what they did worked. Other times, it didn’t. And because they were humans, a lot of myths and superstitions and unsubstantiated claims circulated and were inherited through generations.
2. The rise of prominent physicians who made important discoveries and contributions that influenced medical practice and education for centuries after them was preceded by the translation movement, which began first with Persian and Indian works but then switched to Greek ones for sociopolitical reasons. The translators were mainly a mix of Christians and Jews with some Muslims among them, many of whom were Persian and Assyrians. Three quick notes about the translations when it comes to medical texts:
A) Some of the Greek terms were difficult and didn’t have a direct equivalent in Arabic. So they were transliterated, a practice that can lead to problems of understanding what the original intent of the term was.
B) With translation comes transformation. Greek medical texts included references to the Greek gods. For example, the original Hippocratic oath swears by Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia, Panacea and all the gods and goddesses. The Arabic translation of such passages would remove these references and put in Allah ﷻ in their place. This is a reflection of the recipient religious milieu directly modifying the original text in the Arabic rendering of it.
C) The translations were made by experts in the field. Simultaneous with the translation, commentaries were written on the original content of the texts, either to expand the knowledge they were bringing forth, or to refute it. There was a respectful irreverence to it all, and none of it was taken as tradition to be statically preserved and paid homage to at any cost because it came from past people and has been the “tradition” for a thousand years.
Given the diversity of influence on the Islamic civilization and diversity of people residing in its societies, a valid question to ask for a Muslim interested in the different types of approaches to health care is the following: What would constitute a medical practice “Islamic” in a metaphysical sense? When you have practices that are rooted in pagan or pantheistic beliefs about the nature of life and reality, how do you sift through so you can take the good and leave the bad?
For those who haven’t read it yet, I wrote a vignette that illustrates how this was done by one of the major Muslim physicians in Islamic history named ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (1162-1231), which you can read here.
To answer the question in a nutshell, it comes down to having an epistemological method to verify claims. This takes us to the last three points I’d like to make for this post:
1. There’s more to medicine than the “medicine”. The doctor-patient relationship is a complex one. Some people will benefit from a conversation with someone who just sits there with a stethoscope around their neck and listens more than they would from any antidepressant that could be prescribed or therapy they undergo. The materialist types like to call this a placebo effect. That only points to the narrow view they have of life. There’s more to healing than the transactional relationship of a physician intervening in any way with the functioning of their patient’s body or thinking patterns. There’s research on this that goes into even the effect of surgery, showing one very common orthopedic procedure’s effect to be due to “placebo”. Much can be said in favour of naturopathic medicine and the benefit millions of people believe they have derived from it. It would be arrogant and presumptuous to claim that it’s all nonsense. Indeed, mainstream “evidence-based” medicine also has its share of unsupported practices and superstitions too. So let’s be clear, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. More can be said about this, but this should suffice for now.
2. When it comes to alternative medicine, a common point of contention its practitioners make to me is “why can’t we take the good and leave the bad”? This point is made as a retort to my assertion that a strong element of paganism and pantheism often runs through these practices being marketed to the Muslim community as “traditional” and “Islamic”. In taking what’s shown to work from various systems of medical practice, and by that I mean it was *demonstrated* with measurement and empirical verification to work, a Muslim should not take on the metaphysics of said systems and promote them as “Islamic”. This is especially the case when it comes to elements of the Unseen. For example, the idea of a force first codified by Aristotle and that can’t be measured, which nevertheless is claimed to have a measurable impact on the body but is yet to actually be verified with real measurement, that is then falsely equivocated with the soul, and then sold as part of what a true practitioner of traditional and “Islamic” medicine works with to bring about healing is a lot of rhetoric without substance in the actual Islamic tradition to back it up. To be clear, this is entirely different to believing in the very real impact of Dhikr or Allah ﷻ’s words on the heart or the body. I’m specifically referring to the use of Greek conceptions of a reality that included gods and goddesses, which has been adjusted and changed over time from Aristotle to Telesio and finally with Descartes, and is now being passed off as the Soul, i.e. the Rūḥ, and employed in the “healing arts”. To make very clear, the point being made here is quite specific and is not a rejection of alternative medicine practices that people feel they have derived benefit from. It’s about the adoption of metaphysical language that is not rooted in the Qur’an or Sunnah. (They ask you ˹O Prophet˺ about the spirit. Say, “Its nature is known only to my Lord, and you ˹O humanity˺ have been given but little knowledge.”) [Quran 17:85]
3. Related to the previous point, a medical practice that bases itself in Greek concepts, roots itself in Latin terms, and cites an ability to work with metaphysical entities to bring about healing using non-Muslim sources, all the while not quoting a single verse of the Quran or an authentic Hadith of the Beloved ﷺ to support its claims, is not spiritually edifying nor Islamically founded.
May Allah grant us wisdom and make the Arabic Quran more readily present in our minds and foremost cited on our tongues as authority than Latin and Arabic translations of Greek mythology.
