introduction: Called to Amma’s Courtyard

My heart pulled for you and you came.

In January 1989 I was quite literally called to Amma, the Muslim femalehealer who is the focus of this book, by the green ﬂag that ﬂies atop hercourtyard.

Many years later now, another set of ﬂags marks the gravesitesof Amma and her husband, Abba, and brings some level of closure tothis project. Flags ﬂy above many small shrines of the green-paintedgravesof Muslim saints that mark the urban landscape of the South Indian city of Hyderabad;

some are actively attended to and others are crumblingand dusty. Other green flags fly above courtyards or are tied to trees,marking a site of current or past Islamic ritual activity. In the years sinceI first met Amma, I have slowly learned of the male lineages and au-thorities represented by these flags and have become keenly aware of how easily Amma’s narrative, a woman’s story, could get lost behind lineagesof male saints represented by the flags. I wonder how many other nar-ratives have been lost over the years, traces of strong women left perhapsonly in a name, a miracle experienced under a flag, a dream not easily decipherable, or other traces with no name at all. This book seeks to tell

IN AMMA’S HEALING ROOM

2some of the narratives of Amma’s unusual position of authority, negoti-ation of gender, and practice of spiritual healing.Amma’s healing room represents a level of popular, non-institutionally based Islamic practice that has been underrepresented in religious studieson Islam in South Asia. One of the purposes of this book is to bring thislevel of practice and experience—what I have called “vernacular Islam”—to the study of Islam and, by writing ethnographically of a particular place,to remind us that “universal” Islam is lived locally. Here, on the ground, vernacular Islam is shaped and voiced by individuals in specific contextsand in specific relationships, individuals who change over time in social,economic, and political contexts that also shift. To study vernacular Is-lam—in this case, through the lens of a specific female healer in SouthIndia—is to identify sites of potential fluidity, flexibility, and innovationin a religious tradition that self-identifies as universal and is often per-ceived to be ideologically monolithic.In linguistics, the term “vernacular” is associated with languages ordialects spoken in particular social and geographic locations; vernaculardialects or languages might be juxtaposed to “standard” forms of a lan-guage that cross social and geographic boundaries or locales. Thus, forIslam, the Five Pillars incumbent on all Muslims—declaration of faith,prayer five times a day, charity, fasting during Ramadan, and performingpilgrimage to Mecca—are examples of knowledge and practices that are“universal,” or transnational, the equivalent of the “standard” form of alanguage (including its basic grammatical structures and vocabulary).Other universalistic characteristics of Islam are the authority of the Quranand the Prophet. Certain marriage customs and other life-cycle rituals,dress and forms of veiling, and devotional practices, on the other hand,often take local, vernacular forms while still being considered to be Islamicby those who practice them (Flueckiger 2003b, 723). The healing tradition described in this book is one such vernacularexpression as it has taken form in the South Indian city of Hyderabad inthe 1990s. Amma sits in a healing room built off of her living quarters, where she meets forty to fifty patients a day—Hindus, Muslims, andChristians—writing amulets of various kinds, battling what she calls ill-nesses of the

s´aita¯n

[lit., the devil], physical, social, and mental illnessescaused by spiritual disruption. Such spiritual illnesses, Amma asserts, can

Introduction3be countered only by spiritual healing, while purely physical illnesses canbe healed only through allopathic (physical) treatments.Most South Asian religious traditions share healing as an important vernacular religious idiom, and many religious healing sites in India draw patients from different religious traditions in the same way Amma’s prac-tice does; spiritual healing is effected across boundaries of religious dif-ference. Most Hyderabadis with whom I have spoken about my ownresearch over the last ﬁfteen years can relate a story about their immediateor extended family of religious healing (and this crosses class and levelsof literacy). Many of these stories involve visits to

pı¯rs

[Muslim spiritualteachers/healers] or

darga¯hs

[shrines of Muslim saints], and many patients who end up at Amma’s healing table have, as they say, “wandered” fromhealer to healer before ﬁnding healing success. Numerous spiritual healingalternatives are found within a mile of Amma’s healing room. In onedirection is a Hindu goddess shrine where, in hopes of gaining fertility,Hindu petitioners tie coconuts in the limbs of the trees that surround itand many Muslim petitioners offer

ta¯zziya¯

[bamboo representations of the tomb of the Prophet’s martyred grandson Hussein]. Down the roadin the other direction is a

darga¯h

where a Muslim

ba¯ba¯

sells rings of precious stones that are said to protect the body and restore the balanceof its elements. (Abba wears such rings on each of his fingers, each witha different kind of stone.) Farther into the neighborhood adjacent to theuniversity one finds St. Anthony’s Church, where a diverse array of pa-tients line up on Thursday mornings to receive the blessing of healingfrom Saint Anthony. A charismatic Christian house church in the sameneighborhood hangs a big banner across the entrance to its compoundthat reads “Jesus Heals” (rather than the perhaps more familiar evangelicalChristian mantra “Jesus Saves”), and the church identifies itself as a “heal-ing church.” Just days before I was to leave Hyderabad to return to the U.S. aftermy year’s fieldwork in 1994–1995, I was invited for a farewell dinner tothe home of a Hindu upper-class secondary school teacher. When I ar-rived, she unapologetically asked me if, before eating, I would accompany her to a goddess temple in fulfillment of a vow she had made to visit thetemple for eleven consecutive Thursdays. She had made the vow to seek healing for her young servant girl, who had been diagnosed with leukemia.