Dr. Aydogan Kars of Monash University will be presenting a paper on prophetic medicine at the religious history conference held at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 2024 April 4th-5th. The conference is titled “Between Reason and Authority. Diverse Paradigms of Doing Science in Pre-Modern Arabo-Islamic World“.
The full conference program can be found here.
Attendance type: Aydogan Kars will be presenting online from Melbourne.
Time: Session 2 begins at 14.20 Warsaw local time // 23:20 Melbourne local time.
Abstract:
“Prophetic medicine” [al-ṭibb al-nabawī], refers to a large body of independent
works that typically collected the traditions [ḥadīths] on health and medicine attributed to
the Prophet Muḥammad. Increasingly bringing the prophetic traditions together with the
Greco-Indo-Arabic medical literature, the prophetic medicine literature embodied a site of
pedagogical ambivalence and change. Were these works studied in the traditional pedagogy
of the transmitted [naqlī] sciences, or that of the rationalist [ʿaqlī] sciences? In this
presentation, I will focus on the early prophetic medicine literature in order to analyze the
relationship between the evolving content of these works and the pedagogies adopted by
their authors and teachers. I will also elaborate on the cultural and socio-political impact of
these changing pedagogies, reflected in the major institutional transformations in Islamicate
medical learning in the thirteenth century.
Bio:
Aydogan Kars is a Senior Researcher in Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Monash
University in Australia. His first book, titled Unsaying God (OUP, 2019), focused on negative
theological trends in the medieval Islamicate world. His second book, ʿUmar Suhrawardī (d.
1234) (Brill, 2022), is a collection of original editions and English translations of twelve
Arabic and Persian works on mysticism and theology penned by a prominent medieval
mystic and the eponym of a Sufi order. Aydogan’s primary research field is medieval Islamic
thought. Here you can find an updated list of Aydogan’s publications:
http://monash.academia.edu/aydogankars
Participation Note:
Aydogan is based in Melbourne, which will be 9 hours ahead of the
Warsaw time during April 2024. It will be difficult for him to participate any session after
4pm in Warsaw time.
