ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the more concrete notion of cleanliness in preference to the more abstract concept of purity, for it is in fact the actual processes of washing and cleansing, both of body parts and ritual areas that Muslims must carry out before prayer and worship. In anthropology, an emphasis on purity is a standard gloss on the course and purposes of religious ritual. The traditional healing methods become so embedded in Islam since the early Arabo-Greek days of nonreligious empiricism that in recent centuries healing and religion can only move together, where the one presupposing the other. There exists a doubt whether the people are in a position to posit the future of this mutually involved relationship between Islam and healing as Muslims in the area transform an old Indian Ocean diaspora into a new one stretching to countries beyond the Indian Ocean, including the New World, and as biomedicine becomes part of the relationship.
