ABSTRACT

One of the earliest treatises entitled “Spiritual Medicine” was produced by the famous physician Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925). Al-Rāzī’s work was part a longer tradition of Hellenistic-Galenic ethics that can be traced back to Galen’s commentary on the Timaeus. Alongside this Hellenistic narrative, religious scholars, such as the Ismāʿīlī scholar Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (fl. 996–1021) and the Sunnī scholar Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1201), produced similar texts that addressed questions of spiritual medicine from a pietistic perspective and that engaged with the tradition of Galenic ethics. This chapter locates this discussion of spiritual health at the intersection of Galenic ethics and pietistic literature. It examines the meaning and the topics of spiritual medicine. It then explores the spiritual nosology: the diseases, their etiologies, and their symptoms, as well as the proposed treatments and their sources. It then investigates how the social, political, and gendered context influenced the making of this genre. Throughout, the chapter traces the contours of the ideal pious self and reflects on how these authors imagined their audience living a pious, good life.