/5LAM AND MEDICINE: A GENERAL OVERVIEW FAZLUR RAHMAN* Introduction At the time of the appearance of Islam in Mecca, there were some Arabs with a knowledge ofmedicine. They had acquired this knowledge at the medical school established earlier at Gundishäpür in southwestern Iran by the Persian king Anüshirawän, who had invited medical experts from Greece and India to teach. Scientific medicine was, therefore, known in Arabia, at least in Mecca [I]. The Koran (Qur'än) [2] itselfdoes not speak about medicine, although it sets high value on health and restoration of health. It stresses good food, like milk and honey (16:6669 ), as blessings of God for man; it speaks not only of grains and fruits created for man by God but reiterates in several places that the "heavens and the earth and whatever is therein has been made subservient to man" to exploit for his good ends (e.g., 22:65, 31:20, 45:13) and he has been created to serve God's purposes. It stresses cleanliness in both physical and spiritual terms and lays down rules of ablution and bathing (e.g., 8:11; 5:41). In the spirit more of the Old Testament than that of the New Testament or of the Greeks, the Koran does not accept a radical mind-body dualism in man. Although it speaks of an outer, physical and an inner, spiritual aspect of the human personality, the human person is not viewed as a composite of two separate or disparate substances which somehow come into an uneasy unison in this life while the "spirit" longs to free itself from this bond or bondage. Even though many later Muslim mystics (Sufis) and philosophers accepted such a view, the Koran and orthodox Islam regard a human being as a unitary functioning organism ; their view of afterlife is, therefore, not of the soul's survival after bodily death but, rather, of God's revival of the whole organism on the Day of Resurrection. In this life, health means the well-being of the ?Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, 1155 East Fifty-eighth Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637.© 1984 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/84/2704-0409$01 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 27, 4 · Summer 1984 \ 585 whole organism, in body and mind. The Koran speaks of Saul's receiving from God "amplitude of body and knowledge" (2:243). Religion and Medical Tradition Although a few medical treatments are attributed to the Prophet Muhammad himself, it is not until the late seventh century—about halfa century after Egypt's conquest by Muslims—that the Arabs came into direct contact with Greek scientific medicine in Egypt. It was, however, during the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad that, from the eighth to the tenth century c.e., systematic translations were officially sponsored by the government from Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Sanskrit. It was particularly Greek works in philosophy, medicine, and the physical sciences (often through the intermediary of Syriac) that formed the basis of the "secular" scientific intellectual culture of Islam that flourished so brilliantly from the ninth to the fourteenth century c.e. and influenced so durably and profoundly the medieval European tradition. Whereas in the eighth and ninth centuries the majority of medical men in Islam were Christians, Jews, or Zoroastrians who wrote in Arabic, later on Muslims themselves took over the medical art, although none of them knew any Greek. It is also worth noting that, although Muslims had the philosophical and scientific Greek works translated into Arabic, works of Greek literature and religion were left alone. Islamic monotheistic belief did not allow Greek gods, goddesses, and their mythologies to enter the sacred territory and confuse its spiritual content. But alongside scientific thought and rational philosophy, Hermetism, Gnosticism, and other forms of occult and magical trends also entered into Islam. Astronomy and astrology, scientific chemistry and alchemy, scientific medicine and supernatural healing all existed side by side with one another. Certain areas of the occult did, indeed, help the development of science. Alchemy, by which one sought to discover the extraordinary or "miraculous" qualities of substances...