This paper explores how Muslim medical healers in South Asia creatively positioned Islamic healing as a system of political critique and social renewal during the medical and political crises of World War II. Islamic humoral healing is a system of traditional medicine in South Asia that melds the ancient Greek concept of the four humors with Islamic notions of wellness. Draconian British food allocation policies and crop failures during World War II caused a famine in which three million people in Bengal died. In response, Muslim healers in Bengal (in eastern British India) made the case for Islamic humoral medicine as a tool to regulate public health that could both heal individual bodies and rebalance Bengal’s body politic during the social dislocations and medical crises of the famine. Specifically, this paper investigates the diaries and radio addresses of Habibur Rahman, a prominent Muslim healer in eastern Bengal. As Bengal’s economic fabric was strained by the famine and the global war from 1943 to 1945, Habibur Rahman drew on the theory of the four humors in Islamic medicine to propose a social vision in which Bengal was balanced between different communities and healed by scientific food preparation. Rahman challenged British colonial assumptions about the decline of Islamic sciences in the modern era in his radio addresses and diaries. Instead, Rahman and his fellow Muslim healers contested this story of Muslim scientific decline by celebrating a ‘Golden Age’ of Islamic healing located in the Indian subcontinent during the twentieth century.
