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How did Muslim scholars of the religious sciences (ulema) help support the health of their communities, in and beyond the city? The history of public health in the Islamic world has often focused on cities in the Near East, drawing on plague treatises, market inspection manuals, and legal disputes over substances like tobacco. But across the Indian Ocean world, from the Tihama of Yemen to western India, their texts on medicine took different forms. In this talk, I will focus on the medical writings of ulema in Yemen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, bringing new historical actors into the history of public health and attending to regional variation. These ulema attempted to intervene in communal health by adapting medicine to their local contexts and urging peers to compose, study and use medical texts. Intergenerational relationships between male scholars became one site of public health in this region. The accessible texts they wrote on medicine eventually made their way into libraries in South Asia, including the Hazrat Pir Mohammad Shah Dargah Library of Ahmedabad.
Shireen Hamza is a historian and artist living in Chicago. She teaches with the Prison & Neighborhood Arts & Education Project and participates in the disability dance community. She completed her PhD in Harvard's History of Science department and continues her research on Islam, medicine and environment in the medieval Indian Ocean world through a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program.
