ABSTRACT

The coda investigates the three central concepts that animate the book: piety, patienthood, and medieval Islam. It looks at how piety can be understood as a discourse of care for the self and of self-disciplining and how it provides an important window into understanding religious knowledge and practice. It then investigates what distinguishes “patienthood” as a category at the intellectual, social, and historical levels and how it is different from illness or health. Finally, the coda looks to unpack “medieval Islam” as an historiographic, methodological, and ethnoreligious category and investigates what role this category plays, or should play, in our scholarship.