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  • Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 by Ellen J. Amster
  • Hannah-Louise Clark (bio)
Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956, by Ellen J. Amster. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013. $60.

Medicine and the Saints is an ambitious, pathbreaking interdisciplinary study of the politics of health in Morocco. Ellen J. Amster sees the Moroccan body “as an archive, a repository of a lost form of political authority” (p. 27). She uses this archive both to demonstrate the coherence of precolonial healing practices in Morocco within an “Islamic paradigm,” and to expose the “messiness of medicine as applied colonial practice” during the French Protectorate (p. 143). Her major contribution lies in connecting two historiographies that until now have largely operated in isolation. Amster brings methods and analytical techniques familiar to Africanist historians, particularly oral narratives, to the attention of historians of the Middle East and North Africa. Conversely, historians of health and healing in sub-Saharan Africa will gain rich comparative insights from this study of science, Islam, and colonialism.

The book unfolds in two parts: the first considers the sociology of knowledge in [End Page 170] precolonial Morocco, the second deals with how Moroccan nationalists, healers, and sufferers engaged with the colonial welfare state. In chapter one, Amster explains precolonial healing dynamics in terms of a Kuhnian “scientific paradigm” (akin to Foucault’s discursive formation). Here Amster is working against anthropological readings of Moroccan medicine as social ritual or “medical pluralism,” and what historians of Islamic medicine have characterized as remnants of pre-Islamic paganism. She argues instead that Galenism and “Jazulite sovereignty in saintly healing” (p. 45) formed distinct layers of a single, popular medical cosmology. We see this scientific paradigm in action in chapter five, in which Amster evinces that Moroccan women “knowers” mediated textual traditions and legal opinions on Galenism, which they accessed through popular medical texts and the advice of druggists.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the interplay between European imperialism, science, and Islam, first in Algeria and then Morocco. Amster argues for the relevance of metropolitan intellectual models to the elaboration of French views on Muslim physiology and pathology in Algeria, which were then extended to Morocco. Her insistence on the role of positivism in colonial medical thought seems well-founded. Under the influence of Auguste Comte, French medical students in this period were born positivist, since they were required to study preliminary courses in physics, chemistry and natural sciences — much like pre-med students today — before advancing to candidacy. However, there seems to be a methodological tension between Amster’s categorical judgments about hygiene policy in Algeria, and her careful attention to practices in Morocco. In a later chapter, a retired European social worker from a Rabat clinic declares, “There was no model … We [female social workers] were the model” (p. 201). It is worth considering how inclusion of Algerian sources might have led to a similar view of developments in Algeria, or at least brought other actors and voices to the fore.

One of the most fascinating chapters explores the previously unstudied records of municipal hygiene bureaus in Casablanca, Fez, Marrakech, Meknes, Mogador, Oudjda and Settat, making this a valuable addition to literature on colonial cities. Amster provides persuasive evidence that nationalists, such as ‘Allal al-Fasi, cut their political teeth in urban health activism, not only in the student salons and labor unions of Paris. Historians of North Africa have tended to read religion as race, but this chapter takes an important step in the direction of disentangling the processes and discourses that meshed religious communal and ethnic identity and racial categories in France’s North African empire, showing how the organization of health care along religious communal lines undermined the efforts of epidemiologists, produced the politics of Istiqlal, and oriented Jews towards the Alliance Israélite Universelle and Zionist charities.

Amster is careful to show how colonial biomedicine could help and heal as well as harm. In chapter five, we learn how colonial law and biomedicine, exemplified in the use of the Friedmann pregnancy test, displaced the expert legal judgment of...

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