AAR Religion, Culture, and History- Prophetic Medicine

Prophetic medicine is a large body of literature on medical sciences and religious teachings penned by Muslim scholars since the early ninth century. Prophetic medicine has become vastly popular, and today it plays a contested yet significant role in the global markets of alternative medicine. Aydogan Kars provides the first account of the early history of this influential literature from its formation until the fourteenth century. Analyzing otherwise unstudied or little-known works in the field, the author expands our knowledge on the scholarly, social, and geographical influence of prophetic medicine. In Prophetic Medicine, he engages with learning pedagogies and their manifestations in written as well as aural cultures across Afro-Eurasia. He develops an original theoretical framework of medieval soundscape that was a significant component of Islamic learning and popular culture. Kars demonstrates that the diffusion of prophetic medicine into wide segments of Muslim communities played a key role in the establishment of medical colleges and the extended reach of medical texts to larger groups of scholars in the thirteenth century. Prophetic Medicine provides English translations of newly discovered and hitherto unstudied early books of prophetic medicine. Dozens of manuscripts of works produced in diverse fields, including medicine, ascetic piety, and prophetic traditions are analyzed and brought into critical conversation with literary sources to identify hundreds of individuals, texts, locations, and the changing pedagogies adopted in learning them. Prophetic Medicine provides a unique lens, and an ear, to the social and geographical formations and transformations of Muslim knowledge networks.