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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 May 2023
“At the heart of this topic is a puzzle (lughz),” my long-term friend and interlocutor Ahmad often said. I long thought Ahmad's interest in questions of disease at the intersection of psychiatry and Islam was only intellectual until I learned about one of his cousins’ past ailments. A skillful narrator, Ahmad had colorful ways of depicting that puzzle. “Imagine,” he once told me, “a young pious woman, a college student. Suddenly, she stops praying and studying, is morose, even aggressive sometimes. She locks herself in her room when she does not wander the streets, disappearing for hours. The family is worried, and they wonder: what is the problem?” Switching the tone from evocative to analytic, Ahmad continued: “In Egypt, when it comes to symptoms like seizures, hallucinations, and sudden behavioral changes, people use one of two main diagnoses: jinn possession (mass al-jinn) or mental illness (maraḍ nafsī). The young woman is either possessed or insane.” Ahmad's appeal to the imagination worked, as I came to think of Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image that can alternatively be seen as a duck or a rabbit, with the duck's beak appearing as the rabbit's ears and vice versa.
1 I use pseudonyms to protect my interlocutors’ anonymity. I have also modified and/or omitted some identifying details. I transliterate the Arabic letter ج as the colloquial “g” when emphasizing local terminology.
2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 165–66Google Scholar.
3 Szabo, Jason, “Seeing Is Believing? The Form and Substance of French Medical Debates over Lourdes,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 2 (2002): 199–230CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Luhrmann, T. M., When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship to God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)Google Scholar.
4 The most emblematic Hollywood example is The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973).
5 This main period of research was preceded and followed by shorter visits in 2008, 2013, and 2016. The broader research on which this article is based focused on healing dilemmas at the intersection of Islam and psychiatry through an analysis of the practices of and debates around revivalist Qurʾanic healing. Mixing interviews, observations, and textual analysis of printed and audiovisual materials, the research included several groups of interlocutors: Qurʾanic healers, mental health professionals, patients, religious scholars, and other Egyptians interested in this topic.
6 Unless otherwise specified, “science” henceforth refers to “modern science.” The semantic and pragmatic meanings of the word “science” and of its Arabic counterpart ʿilm have changed over the centuries. For a discussion of such transformations in relation to ʿilm, see Elshakry, Marwa, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Noah Salomon, “Science and the Soul: An Introduction,” The Immanent Frame, September 27, 2018, https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/09/27/science-and-the-soul-introduction/.
8 Pandolfo, Stefania, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shakry, Omnia El, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
9 For instance, see Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Harrison, Peter, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Kraidy, Marwan and Khalil, Joe, Arab Television Industries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Enckelman, Dale F. and Anderson, Jon W., eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
11 On presentations of the jinn in print, see Drieskens, Barbara, Living with Djinns: Understanding and Dealing with the Invisible in Cairo (London: Saqi, 2008), 57–64Google Scholar. On other aspects on the unseen on-screen, see Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011).
12 The first is an episode of the show al-Mahkama (The Court), aired in 2011 on the channel al-Nas, and the second of Mahkama al-ʿUlama (The Religious Scholars’ Court), aired in 2012 on the channel al-Hafiz. The third one consisted of two episodes of The Middle Path (al-Wasatiyya), a program organized and presented by Tariq al-Suwaydan, a well-known Kuwaiti Islamic scholar, Muslim Brotherhood supporter, and media personality, on the channel al-Resala. A Qurʾanic healer shared in 2012 a now removed YouTube link to this show that did not specify when it was aired.
13 For representations of Qurʾanic healing and psychiatry in the press, see Elizabeth Coker, “Claiming the Public Soul: Representations of Qur'anic Healing and Psychiatry in the Egyptian Print Media,” Transcultural Psychiatry 46 (2009): 672–94. Two examples of films that have addressed the jinn possession/mental disorder pair are The Humans and the Jinns (al-Ins wa-l-Jinn, Muhammad Radi, 1985) and The Blue Elephant (al-Fil al-Azraq, Marwan Hamid, 2014, 2019).
14 For an overview of jinn in the Islamic world, see Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of Jinn (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
15 For a brief overview of such positions, see Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
16 In the discourses I analyze in this article, psychiatry, framed as a modern science, is reduced to biological psychiatry, which dominates clinical psychiatric practice in Egypt. Discussions of other psy-approaches, which are present if not prominent, are not included. On the somatic orientation of modern Egyptian psychiatry since the nineteenth century, see Marilyn Mayers, “A Century of Psychiatry: The Egyptian Mental Hospitals” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1984).
17 For a comprehensive discussion of madness in medieval Islam, see Michael Dols, Majnūn: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed. Diana Immisch (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992).
18 For instance, see Khaled Fahmy, “Medicine and Power: Towards a Social History of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 23, no. 2 (2000): 1–45; and Ellen Amster, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013).
19 On the reformist school (madrasat al-iṣlāḥ) that was especially active in this regard, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1970). See also Sherine Hamdy, “Blinding Ignorance: Medical Science, Diseased Eyes, and Religious Practice in Egypt,” Arab Studies Journal 12–13, nos. 1–2 (2004–5): 26–45.
20 Matthew Melvin-Kouski, “Is (Islamic) Occult Science Science?” Theology and Science 18, no. 2 (2020): 303–24.
21 “Law no. 415 from 1954 concerning the Practice of the Medical Profession,” al-Waqaʾiʿa al-Misriyya, no. 58, July 22, 1954.
22 For an example, see On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 85–114.
23 Numerous anthropological studies attest to this continuity. For an overview, see Hania Sholkamy, “Conclusion: The Medical Cultures of Egypt,” in Health and Identity in Egypt, ed. Hania Sholkamy and Farha Ghannam (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 111–28.
24 For an early example of such discourse, see John Walker, Folk Medicine in Modern Egypt: Being the Relevant Parts of the Ṭibb al-Rukka or Old Wives’ Medicine of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ismāʿīl (London: Luzac, 1934). See also Beverly A. Tsacoyianis, Disturbing Spirits: Mental Illness, Trauma, and Treatment in Modern Syria and Lebanon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).
25 For instance, see Soheir Morsy, “Islamic Clinics in Egypt: The Cultural Elaboration of Biomedical Hegemony,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1988): 355–69; and Sherine Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012).
26 Roel Meijer, ed., Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). The presence of Salafism in Egypt predates the Islamic revival even if the movement gained more visibility in the latter context. On Salafism in Egypt, see Aaron Rock-Singer, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022).
27 On the Salafism of Qurʾanic healing, see Ana Vinea, “‘What Is Your Evidence?’ A Salafi Therapy in Contemporary Egypt,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 39, no. 3 (2019): 500–512. On Salafi-influenced healers in other countries, see Emilio Spadola, The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).
28 In scholarly literature, the term “Qurʾanic healing” is often used to refer to Islamic therapeutic engagements broadly. Here, following Egyptian usage (which has its own inevitable variations and inconsistencies), I use Qurʾanic healing more narrowly to designate this specific Salafi-oriented therapy.
29 Qurʾanic healers direct most of their critiques to amulets, Sufi-inflected therapies, and the zār ritual based on the appeasement of jinn, which is rejected as unpermitted. Certainly, such therapeutic forms and orientations did not disappear; they are, however, relatively less present in public debates. For an overview of therapeutic engagements with the jinn in Egypt, see Drieskens, Living with Djinns; and Gerda Sengers, Women and Demons: Cult Healing in Islamic Egypt (Leiden Brill, 2003). For the zār ritual, see Hager El Hadidi, Zar: Spirit Possession, Music, and Healing Rituals in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016).
30 Without embracing jinn possession, these psychiatrists did bring an interest in Islam within a mostly secular psychiatric field. On the “Islamization of knowledge,” see, for instance, Mona Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt (London: Routledge, 2002).
31 Mariz Tadros, “State Welfare in Egypt since Adjustment: Hegemonic Control with a Minimalist Role,” Review of African Political Economy 33, no. 108 (2006): 237–54. According to a World Health Organization report from 2006, total mental health expenditure amounts to no more than 2 percent of the health budget; resources are concentrated in large urban hospitals at the expense of community care and rural regions; mental health is poorly integrated in primary care; and the incidence of mental disorders is on the rise. See WHO-AIMS Report on Mental Health System in Egypt (Cairo, Egypt: World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health Egypt, 2006).
32 See Michael Fawzy, “Quality of Life and Human Rights Conditions in a Public Psychiatric Hospital in Cairo,” International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare 18, no. 4 (2015): 199–217.
33 Charles Hirschkind, “Beyond Secular and Religious: An Intellectual Genealogy of Tahrir Square,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1 (2012): 49–53.
34 On Alexandrian Salafism, see Richard Gauvin, Salafi Ritual Purity: In the Presence of God (London Routledge, 2013). Some Qurʾanic healers saw their therapy as predominately urban, and perceived rural healing as rife with unpermitted practices.
35 Egyptian Qurʾanic healing is a male endeavor, in practice and in concept. During my research, I have heard of only one female Qurʾanic healer, but was unable to meet her. Adopting a patriarchal gender imaginary in which women are weak, impressionable, and fearful, my interlocutors saw jinn exorcism as men's work. Beyond the world of Qurʾanic healing, however, female healers abound especially in the zār ritual. A full account of the gender dimensions of Salafi-oriented healing deserves an article of its own.
36 Founded in the 1920s, Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya is the leading Salafi organization in Egypt promoting the doctrinal, interpretative, and sociopolitical practices at the core of this diverse movement. With origins in the same decade, al-Jamaʿiyya al-Sharaʿiyya is among the largest daʿwa organizations in the country. Identified by some Egyptians with Salafism, it has had, however, a multifaceted and variable relationship with the movement. See Gauvin, Salafi Ritual Purity, 33–47; and Rock-Singer, In the Shade.
37 As Qurʾanic healers note several hadiths describe the benefits, including curative and protective, of reciting these verses. They also bring as evidence these verses’ inclusion, alongside the practice of curative recitation more broadly, in Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya's Prophetic Medicine, a fourteenth-century religious figure central for both Qurʾanic healing and the larger Salafi movement. For an overview of such uses of the Qurʾan, see Kathleen O'Connor, “Popular and Talismanic Uses of the Qurʾān,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Johanna Pink, accessed April 10, 2023, http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQCOM_00152.
38 This does not mean that Qurʾanic healers’ understanding of mental disorders is identical to that of psychiatrists; an issue that is beyond the scope of this article.
39 On the concept of tagriba in Qurʾanic healing, see Vinea, “‘What Is Your Evidence?’” 505–7.
40 Shaykh Ibrahim, the Qurʾanic healer who participated in the Egypt Today show, published such a book: Ibrahim ʿAbd al-ʿAlim, al-Radd al-Mubin ʿala Bidʿat al-Muʿalijin wa-Asʾilat al-Haʾirin fi Majal al-Mass wa-l-Sihr wa-ʿAlaqatuhu bi-l-Tibb wa-l-Din (Cairo: al-Faruq al-Haditha li-l-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1998). Shaykh Bali's books are: Wahid ʿAbd al-Salam Bali, Wiqayat al-Insan min al-Jinn wa-l-Shaytan, 11th ed. (Cairo: Dar al-Bashir, 2001) and al-Sarim al-Battar fi al-Tasaddi li-l-Sahara al-Ashrar, 11th ed. (Cairo: Dar Ibn Ragab, 2008).
41 See Bredström, Anna, “Culture and Context in Mental Health Diagnosing: Scrutinizing the DSM-5 Revision,” Journal of Medical Humanities 40 (2019): 347–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
42 For instance, see Langford, Jean, Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Jackson, Mark, ed., A Global History of Medicine (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
43 See Drieskens, Living with Djinns, 37–57.
44 As part of my research, I conducted interviews and observations in the outpatient clinic and the female inpatient wards of ʿAbbasiyya.
45 Janzen, John, The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 For instance, see Langwick, Stacey, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
47 Both Maryam and Mustafa were reluctant to provide details about the latter's divorce, though Maryam hinted that Mustafa's mental illness and resulting difficulty in staying employed were the triggering factors.
48 Hamdy, Sherine, “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian Dialysis Ward,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 4 (2008): 553–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 See notes 8 and 9.
50 Emily Ogden, “Modernity's Residues,” The Immanent Frame, March 22, 2019, https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/03/22/modernitys-residues/.
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