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Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities

By C. Ceyhun Arslan

This blog essay examines the relationship between medicine and modernity in three Middle Eastern narrative sources – Fatma Aliye’s (1862–1936) and Ahmet Midhat’s (1844–1912) Hayal ve Hakikat (Imagination and Truth, 1891), Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s (1858–1930) Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām aw Fatra min al-zaman (What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, or, A Period of Time, 1898–1902), and Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s (1905–1992) Qandīl Umm Hāshim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim, 1944). I argue that these texts depicted medicine as something that not only heals bodies but also reforms entire societies and brings modernity to their communities. They also emphasized that medical doctors should not only keep up with the Western science; they should also have a good understanding of the local customs. As I show examples from diverse works of Middle Eastern literatures, I also call for more comparative, non-Eurocentic perspectives in medical humanities. As Burcu Alkan, Ezgi Sarıtaş, and Şima İmşir pointed out, medical humanities still values “the Anglo-American and continental European understandings;” furthermore, the field of narrative medicine “relies on the mostly Western, middle-class notion of an autonomous self.”[1]  This essay will note that area studies, such as Middle Eastern Studies, can cultivate comparative approaches and help medical humanities move beyond its Eurocentrism.

The late Ottoman Empire witnessed many socioeconomic shifts. The empire experienced territorial losses and experienced significant economic debacles.  Many intellectuals also claimed that their society experienced a significant decline, and expressed a yearning for a golden age, whether this be the early modern Ottoman Empire or al-Andalus. They claimed that, as their societies modernized and Westernized, their communities would bring back these golden ages. That is why these intellectuals genuinely believed that their society could modernize easily and saw themselves as “father-figures” who would start a new era and “heal” their societies.[2] As Şima İmşir has put it, “Because medicine functions as one of the most powerful agents of reformation since the Tanzimat (reorganisation) edict in 1839, the Ottoman Empire’s first official attempt at Westernisation, social and political transformations therefore lie at the heart of this discussion.” [3] Many late Ottoman Arabic works also make a similar association between medicine and modernization. For example, the Iraqi poet Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī (1875–1945) argued that an author is like a medical doctor: just as a medical doctor examines a human body to understand its defects and point to ways to heal them, a writer examines the body of a society to diagnose its shortcomings and find ways to fix them.[4] Indeed, Faten Hussein notes that most Arabic narratives on illness deal with illness of society, since “[l]ots of Arabic authors use illness as a metonym for the diseased state of society in general.”[5] In a similar vein, Abir Hamdar notes that “it is impossible to read illness as anything other than metaphorical” in Arabic literature since “illness becomes a privileged sign of social, political, and ideological otherness.”[6]  

A late Ottoman work that describes medicine as a vehicle of modernization is Ahmet Midhat’s and Fatma Aliye’s co-written novel, Hayal ve Hakikat (Imagination and Truth). The story features the female character, Vedad, and the male character, Vefa, who fall in love with each other and decide to eventually get married. However, right before the marriage, Vefa suddenly disappears, and this causes Vedad to fall sick and ultimately pass away. Later, we learn that Vefa decides to give up his plans for marriage, since he claims that his society now “lives in the age of truth.”[7] For Vefa, marriage is “only a beginning, not a goal.”[8] Since he is very successful in his studies, Vefa believes that he can sacrifice marriage and ultimately pursue a career in medicine to guide his society and community to a better future. At the end of the novel, Ahmet Midhat provides a lengthy explanation about the “sickness of hysteria.” He draws upon the medical discourse to make the case for why women should read novels.[9]

Figure 1 Fatma Aliye. Source: Link
Figure 2 Ahmet Midhat. Source: Link

Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām aw Fatra min al-zaman (What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, or, A Period of Time) also testifies to the relationship between medicine and Egypt’s modernization. The work, which defies easy genre categorizations, features two main characters, ʿĪsā ibn Hishāmand a Pasha, who wander around and make important observations about the Egyptian society. When the Pasha gets sick, he does not want to receive treatment, and instead wishes to get cured through traditional methods, such as incense and amulets, as was the case “in olden times.”[10] At first, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, who wants to help the Pasha integrate into the modern Egyptian society, accepts the Pasha’s request: “God is my witness that the only reason I put up with this trickster’s routine was out of respect for the Pāshā’s naïveté when it came to traditional beliefs.”[11] However, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām eventually decides to consult medical doctors since the Pasha’s sickness does not get cured. Here, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām’s search for a good doctor also gives the reader important insights about how Egypt should modernize. For example, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām first seeks help from a local Egyptian doctor, who has good knowledge of Western cultures and values: “Just as he was leaving, I spoke to him in French instead of Arabic in order to find out what exactly the sickness was without the Pāshā understanding how serious his condition was.”[12] However, the first medical doctor he consults does not achieve to cure the Pasha’s sickness. Likewise, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām seeks the help of a foreign, French doctor, who fails to cure the patient. Finally, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām finds a local doctor who is conversant with both the local Egyptian customs and the Western medical techniques. Indeed, he gives the best advice to the Pasha, who is told to move to another city with a better climate. Once the Pasha moves to the countryside, he gets better. 

Figure 3. Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī. Source: Link

Another Egyptian story that makes a similar association between modernization and medicine is Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s Qandīl Umm Hāshim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim). The story features the main character, Ismāʿīl, who receives his medical degree in the UK and returns to Egypt as an eye doctor. The British doctors think that Ismāʿīl’s specialization in medicine will lead Egypt to an “eye-opening modernity,” as they note: “Your country is in need of you, for it is the land of the blind.”[13] Ismāʿīl believes that he will be a savior of his Egyptian nation as he equates medicine with science and modernization. He describes his full transformation in the following words:  “If this new self had cast aside religious belief, it had substituted for it a stronger faith in science.”[14] Ultimately, Ismāʿīl repeats the vision that one finds in many examples of late Ottoman works, which emphasized that the Middle Eastern societies had experienced a decline: “In his mind Egypt was like the forest bride touched by the wand of a wicked witch that had sent her to sleep. She was dressed in all her jewelry and finery for the night of consummation…. When will she wake up? When?”[15] Ultimately, however, Ismāʿīl realizes that his strict adherence to science and medicine has no tangible impact on his community. His Egyptian patients still believe that the lamp of Umm Hāshim will cure all kinds of blindness. The story ends when Ismāʿīl finds a new treatment method: He still continues to use the treatment methods[BA1]  he learned during his medical education while also applying a droplet from Umm Hāshim’s lamp to his patients. Therefore, “[h]e went back again to his medicine and science. But now he was given the support of faith.”[16] Like What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, The Lamp of Umm Hashim also believes in the vision of a modern society that puts a great emphasis on medicine, while also emphasizing the need to convey this vision to large segments of the society.

Figure 4. Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, Qandīl Umm Hāshim (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 2000). Source: Link

Edmund Burke III has “focus[ed] on the striking family resemblance of Mediterranean societies in the ‘group photo’ of their encounter with modernity over the course of the long nineteenth century (1750–1914).”[17] One may also observe a similar “family resemblance” in how the Ottoman authors, Fatma Aliye and Ahmet Midhat, the Egyptian authors, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī and Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, and the Iraqi poet Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī, responded to modernization and Westernization in their societies, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also provide similar perspectives on medicine due to their similar encounters with modernity. These authors did not depict medicine simply as a means to cure human bodies; instead, medicine would modernize their entire societies.

We need more comparative perspectives in medical humanities to flesh out this kind of family resemblance. One comparative monograph that examines literary works on medicine from different linguistic traditions, such as Arabic, Korean, and Japanese, is Karen Laura Thornber’s Global Healing: Literature, Health, and Medicine. Thornber has examined “global literature,” “narratives that grapple with challenges and crises that have global implications or counterparts globally, whether at present, in the past, or likely in the future”[18] in order to discuss how literary studies can address the most pressing challenges of our age. According to Thornber, not all literary works can circulate globally. Many works that do not meet the global demands of the literary market are overlooked if they are not translated into a major Western language.

However, as literary critics become more preoccupied with world literature, they should not ignore works that do not circulate within the globe, especially because many works that do not circulate still address some of the most pressing issues of our societies. Paying attention to how “works of world literature had circulated and been translated” can sometimes prevent critics from giving “appropriate attention to the insights [that texts that do not circulate] were offering into the urgency of healing suffering and the possibilities for enabling wellbeing.”[19] This requires scholars of medical humanities to pay attention to works that do not necessarily get canonized or translated. For example, Orhan Pamuk’s (b. 1952) Nights of Plague (Veba Geceleri, 2021)could be an eye-opening work for medical humanities; however, Pamuk is already a well-known author of world literature. The field needs to pay attention to non-Western works that have not been translated or received much attention in world literature even though these works may have had a wide reception in their respective local and/or national communities. For example, İmşir examines works such as Hıçkırık (Sobbing, 1938) that did not get canonized in the fields of world or Middle Eastern literatures, although these works had a wide reception in their respective communities.[20]

Globalizing medical humanities is a daunting task if it requires paying attention to non-canonical and non-Western works that do not get translated into English. I thus consider area studies, including Middle Eastern studies, a useful category for literary critics. Christopher Bush argues that areas such as the Middle East and the Mediterranean will attain increasing prominence in literary studies: “Areas represent not just a quantitative compromise between nation and world but also a variety of specific, qualitative responses to the challenge of thinking literary studies beyond the nation. They break open the limits of the national while retaining enough specificity to allow for in-depth research and knowledge of the relevant languages, for example.[21] Medical humanities, too, can encourage more works that do not lose sight of specific historical contexts and languages as it also engages with the different languages that circulate in the Middle East or the Mediterranean. Furthermore, one does not even have to know or study multiple languages to use the Mediterranean or Middle Eastern framework.  One can, for example, examine the relationship between illness and modernity in Turkish literature and yet still retain an awareness that this relationship does not only hold true for the Turkish national context only; many Iraqi or Egyptian authors had similar perspectives on the relationship between modernization and medicine. After all, the relationship between medicine and literature had “family resemblances” in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Arabic and Turkish works as these works testified to similar experiences of modernization that their societies underwent.


I would like to thank Dana Rami Jeblawi who helped me locate some of the sources I used for this essay.


Footnotes

[1] Burcu Alkan, Ezgi Sarıtaş, and Şima İmşir, “Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against, and Beyond Medicine,” Forum Transregionale Studien, 26 Steptember 2023, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/48861.

[2] For more on these socioeconomic shifts and intellectual and literary responses in late Ottoman works, see C. Ceyhun Arslan, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

[3] Şima İmşir, Health, Women and Literature in Twentieth-Century Turkey: Bodies of Exception (New York: Routledge, 2023), 3.

[4] Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī, Āthāruhu fī al-naqd wa-l-adab, ed. Dāwūd Sallūm, ʿĀdil Kuttāb Naṣīf al- ʿAzzāwī and ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Rashūd (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2014), 1: 126–27.

[5]Faten Hussein and Neil Vickers, “The Long Read: Arabic Illness and National Politics,” King’s English, https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/english/2017/07/13/the-long-read-arabic-illness-narratives-and-national-politics/, 13 July 2017.

[6] Abir Hamdar, The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 22.

[7] Ahmet Midhat and Fatma Aliye, Hayal ve Hakikat (Istanbul: 1309 AH), 52.

[8] Ibid., 58.

[9] Ibid., 61–73.

[10] Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, or, A Period of Time, ed. and trans. Roger Allen (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 1: 251. Allen’s edition also includes the Arabic source text; thus, I also use Allen’s work when referring to the Arabic source text. All original Arabic quotes appear one page before the English translations.

[11] Ibid., 1: 255.

[12] Ibid, 1: 257.

[13] Yahya Hakki, “The Lamp of Umm Hashim,” in The Lamp of Umm Hashim and Other Stories (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 62; Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, Qandīl Umm Hāshim, 3rd edition (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, n.d. [1944]), 26.

[14] Hakki, “The Lamp of Umm Hashim,” 67; Ḥaqqī, Qandīl Umm Hāshim, 32–33.

[15] Hakki, “The Lamp of Umm Hashim,” 68–69; Ḥaqqī, Qandīl Umm Hāshim, 34.

[16] Hakki, “The Lamp of Umm Hashim,” 86; Ḥaqqī, Qandīl Umm Hāshim, 56.

[17] Edmund Burke, “The Mediterranean Modernity: The Longue Durée Perspective,” in Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South, in Judith E. Tucker (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 78.

[18] Karen Laura Thornber, Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy and Care (Brill, 2020), 10.

[19] Ibid., 9.

[20] İmşir, Health, Women and Literature, 116–121.

[21] Christopher Bush, “Areas: Bigger than the Nation, Smaller than the World,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: State of the Discipline Report (London: Routledge, 2017), 172.


About the Author

C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and a Fellow of the Alexander von Humbolt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Saarland University. His book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has just been published by Edinburgh University Press, and it has appeared in the Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire series. He is working on a second book project, tentatively entitled Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French and Ottoman Literatures. Arslan’s articles and book chapters have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and edited volumes such as Comparative Literature StudiesJournal of Arabic Literature, and The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry.


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Citation: C. Ceyhun Arslan, Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentric Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 30.07.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/1240x


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (July 30, 2024). Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved April 30, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1240x


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The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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