Lokman, Chholeman and Manik Pir: Multiple Frames of Institutionalising Islamic Medicine in Modern Bengal Projit Mukharji* Summary. As a Muslim-majority region, Bengal is conspicuous by its absence from histories of the institutionalisation of Islamic medicine in South Asia. Bengal’s invisibility in these histories is partly a result of exclusive scholarly pre-occupations with Unani Tibb and, to a much lesser extent, Tibb ul Nabi. ‘Islamic medicine’ in Bengal was institutionalised under other names and drew upon other traditions. This article explores the institutionalisation of three such traditions of ‘Islamic Medicine’ and argues that the form they took drew directly upon the distinctive history of Islam in Bengal. Keywords: Bengal; Islam; Luqman; Solomon; Manik Pir; magic The earliest studies of ‘Islamic Medicine’, commencing in the nineteenth century, had ranged widely across the diverse lands influenced by Islam with a special emphasis on the Near East. 1 Later, more geographically focused studies continued to highlight the ‘Arab Lands’. 2 Studies, particularly of the histories of Islamic medicine in South Asia, were late starters. 3 Within these, in turn, most of the early efforts recorded the work of medieval Muslim court physicians and scholars. 4 It was only in the 1990s that histories of Islamic medicine in the modern period began to be written. The pioneering works of such scholars as Syed Zillurrahman and Neshat Quaiser tried to look at the related ques- tions of the contest between Islamic medicine and ‘western’ medicine and the ways in which the former sought to adapt to the challenges of colonial modernity. 5 These South Asian histories of modern Islamic medicine were largely silent on regional variations within South Asia. They identified mainly two traditions of Islamic therapeutics, namely Unani Tibb (Greco-Islamic Medicine) and Tibb-ul-Nabi (Medicine of the Prophet), which were shared with other areas of the ‘Islamic world’. The lack of interest in regional vari- ations and the exclusive emphasis upon the two traditions available elsewhere in the ‘Islamic world’ have led to a homogenisation of Islamic therapeutics in South Asia. Two recent monographs by Guy Attewell and Seema Alavi have significantly advanced our knowledge of the history of Islamic therapeutics in South Asia. Both amply show that precisely what constituted ‘Islamic medicine’ was not static. Diverse therapeutic ideas and *History Department, McMaster University, Chester New Hall 619, 1280 Main Street, West Hamilton, Ontario, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4LN, Canada. E-mail: projitmukharji@gmail.com © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/shm/hkq097 1 Renan 1883; Browne 1921. For a late example, see Sheehan and Hussain 2002. 2 Burgel in Leslie (ed.) 1976; Conrad in Conrad (ed.) 1995. 3 Hume 1977 is an exception. 4 Siddiqi 1981; Bari 1986–7. 5 Zillurrahman 1994; Quaiser in Pati and Harrison (eds) 2001; Liebeskind in Ernst (ed.) 2002. See also Metcalf 1985. Social History of Medicine page 1 of 19 Social History of Medicine Advance Access published February 19, 2011 at University of Pennsylvania Library on October 2, 2011 shm.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from