MEDICAL PLURALISM IN ARAB AND EGYPTIAN HISTORY - OVERVIEW OF CLASS STRUCTURES AND PHILOSOPHIES OF THE MAIN PHASES

Medical pluralism has been little developed for the study of Arabic medical history because of the scholarly preoccupation with Yūnāni medicine which lasted for a few centuries in the court of medieval Baghdad. Therefore this paper outlines what would be the main trends which competed in the social formations of Arab and Egyptian history during the Islamic era. It has been found best to begin by approaching the trends as ideological expressions of social groups in conflict and not to isolate medical thought from the rest of culture, since most writers would reject a too artificial separation of medicine from other areas of knowledge. Following this procedure. most attention is focused on the social context which produced Avicennianism and on the gradual and ambivalent victory of positivism over Avicenna among ruling classes during the past few centuries. Stress is placed on those who, like the Marabouts, addressed the problem of psychological disruption caused by the adjustment of the masses to a market economy in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Marabouts performed a critical function in the development of the overall modern world economy through their skills, since the whole build up to an through the Industrial Revolution of England was predicated on a steady supply of cheap unfinished products many of which came from the periphery. from regions like the Arab world. In all. five characteristic social formations which spanned Arabo-Egyptian history from the pre-Islamic era to the present are discussed with their different trends in medical thought. The broader methodological argument of the paper is that social history will serve to integrate medical history where political and dynastic history cannot do so, and that a view of history which does not implicitly rest everything on the coming of the West obliges us to take the modern indigenous trends more seriously. © 1979.