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Healing the Body, Healing the Umma--Sufi Saints as Public Healers in Morocco
Abstract
After a failed revolt against Moroccan Sultan ‘Abdallah II (r. 1613-1623), the city of Fez sent two mad saints (majnun) to intercede on their behalf with the enraged ruler. When the sultan received the two emissaries, he scoffed, “The people of Fez couldn’t find any to mediate for them but these two shitters in their rags.” One angry saint replied, “By God, you will not have a free hand [in Fez] for forty-one years,” and the men departed. The sultan’s stomach suddenly reversed and he vomited feces from his mouth for several days, until he sent for the saints and begged their pardon. No sultan ruled in Fez for the period Sidi Jallul had predicted, “until God brought” the ‘Alawid Sultan Rashid. “And this story is true,” concludes the historian Al-‘Ifrani, “for I heard it from many people, and I summarize what was told to us.” Al-Ifrani’s history reveals a Moroccan conception of political sovereignty in which the Sufi saint guarded the Islamic umma’s well-being and corporeal health. The sultan received the bay’a, or contract of rule, defining his limited, temporal powers. But his state was not the body politic; Ibn al-‘Arabi describes the human body as a microcosm of the city, a parallel realm for God’s “divine system for the reform (islah) of the human kingdoms.” God appointed the human soul to be His Viceregent on earth and created the human body as a citadel for its residence. As just rule produces a harmonious body, so an unjust soul provokes a corporeal revolt. The vomiting sultan suggests a social life of Sufi theology in Morocco, a human body active in worldly politics, a living polity constituted through the body. This paper thus offers a conception of “public health” dissociated from the sultan’s state, which did provide medical care for its soldiers, an asylum (maristan) for the mad, and supported assistance to the poor through religious endowments (waqf). Our sources are the nineteenth-century hagiographical compendium of Moroccan Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Kattani entitled Salwat al-Anfas, the topography and architecture of Sufi shrines and of the city of Fez, and medical interviews with elderly residents of Fez. These sources re-construct Fez as a living “geo-political moral body,” in which Sufi saints were “public healers,” restoring (islah) God’s law to individuals in healing and justice to society.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries