“Tandrusti Deen ka Kaam Hai”: Health as a Matter of Religion in Book 9 of Ashraf Ali Thanvi’sBahishti Zewar

Abstract

introduction When scholars have written about health in colonial South Asia, and about indigenous responses to the diffusion of biomedicine through the colonial administration, religious projects that focus on forming pious selves have often been ignored. Below I illustrate how a particular thinker associated with the Deobandi Islamic revival movement used health as a way to make oneself the object of one’s care in order to produce a fortifiedMuslim self. Ashraf Ali Thanvi, a Deobandi aalim (Islamic religious scholar and expert) writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, produced an enduringly influential Urdu religious manual known as the Bahishti Zewar (heavenly ornaments). This