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Introduction: Called to Amma’s Courtyard
- Indiana University Press
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1 introduction: Called to Amma’s Courtyard My heart pulled for you and you came. In January 1989 I was quite literally called to Amma, the Muslim female healer who is the focus of this book, by the green flag that flies atop her courtyard.1 Many years later now, another set of flags marks the gravesites of Amma and her husband, Abba, and brings some level of closure to this project. Flags fly above many small shrines of the green-painted graves of Muslim saints that mark the urban landscape of the South Indian city of Hyderabad;2 some are actively attended to and others are crumbling and dusty. Other green flags fly above courtyards or are tied to trees, marking a site of current or past Islamic ritual activity. In the years since I first met Amma, I have slowly learned of the male lineages and authorities represented by these flags and have become keenly aware of how easily Amma’s narrative, a woman’s story, could get lost behind lineages of male saints represented by the flags. I wonder how many other narratives have been lost over the years, traces of strong women left perhaps only in a name, a miracle experienced under a flag, a dream not easily decipherable, or other traces with no name at all. This book seeks to tell IN AMMA’S HEALING ROOM 2 some of the narratives of Amma’s unusual position of authority, negotiation of gender, and practice of spiritual healing. Amma’s healing room represents a level of popular, non-institutionally based Islamic practice that has been underrepresented in religious studies on Islam in South Asia. One of the purposes of this book is to bring this level of practice and experience—what I have called “vernacular Islam”— to the study of Islam and, by writing ethnographically of a particular place, to remind us that “universal” Islam is lived locally. Here, on the ground, vernacular Islam is shaped and voiced by individuals in specific contexts and in specific relationships, individuals who change over time in social, economic, and political contexts that also shift. To study vernacular Islam —in this case, through the lens of a specific female healer in South India—is to identify sites of potential fluidity, flexibility, and innovation in a religious tradition that self-identifies as universal and is often perceived to be ideologically monolithic. In linguistics, the term “vernacular” is associated with languages or dialects spoken in particular social and geographic locations; vernacular dialects or languages might be juxtaposed to “standard” forms of a language that cross social and geographic boundaries or locales. Thus, for Islam, the Five Pillars incumbent on all Muslims—declaration of faith, prayer five times a day, charity, fasting during Ramadan, and performing pilgrimage to Mecca—are examples of knowledge and practices that are “universal,” or transnational, the equivalent of the “standard” form of a language (including its basic grammatical structures and vocabulary). Other universalistic characteristics of Islam are the authority of the Quran and the Prophet. Certain marriage customs and other life-cycle rituals, dress and forms of veiling, and devotional practices, on the other hand, often take local, vernacular forms while still being considered to be Islamic by those who practice them (Flueckiger 2003b, 723). The healing tradition described in this book is one such vernacular expression as it has taken form in the South Indian city of Hyderabad in the 1990s. Amma sits in a healing room built off of her living quarters, where she meets forty to fifty patients a day—Hindus, Muslims, and Christians—writing amulets of various kinds, battling what she calls illnesses of the śaitān [lit., the devil], physical, social, and mental illnesses caused by spiritual disruption. Such spiritual illnesses, Amma asserts, can [54.173.214.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:35 GMT) Introduction 3 be countered only by spiritual healing, while purely physical illnesses can be healed only through allopathic (physical) treatments. Most South Asian religious traditions share healing as an important vernacular religious idiom, and many religious healing sites in India draw patients from different religious traditions in the same way Amma’s practice does; spiritual healing is effected across boundaries of religious difference . Most Hyderabadis with whom I have spoken about my own research over the last fifteen years can relate a story about their immediate or extended family of religious healing (and this crosses class and levels of literacy). Many of these...