1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910786989103321

Autore

Amster Ellen J. <1970->

Titolo

Medicine and the saints [[electronic resource] ] : science, Islam, and the colonial encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 / / Ellen J. Amster; foreword by Rajae El Aoued

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Austin, TX, : University of Texas Press, 2013

ISBN

0-292-74545-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (351 p.)

Disciplina

610.964

Soggetti

Medicine - Morocco - History

Health - Religious aspects - Islam

Islam and science - History

Morocco Colonization History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Colonial embodiments -- Healing the body, healing the umma: Sufi saints and God's law in a corporeal city of virtue -- Medicine and the mission civilisatrice: a civilizing science and the French sociology of Islam in Algeria and Morocco, 1830-1912 -- The many deaths of Dr. Émile Mauchamp: contested sovereignties and body politics at the court of the sultans, 1877-1912 -- Frederic Le Play in Morocco? the paradoxes of French hygiene and colonial association in the Moroccan city, 1912-1937 -- Harem medicine and the sleeping child: law, traditional pharmacology, and the gender of medical authority -- A midwife to modernity: the biopolitics of colonial welfare and birthing a scientific Moroccan nation, 1936-1956 -- Epilogue. Epistemologies embodied: Islam, France, and the postcolonial.

Sommario/riassunto

The colonial encounter between France and Morocco took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic



of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor’s murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.