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By Joyce Burkhalter Fluekiger; published by Indiana University Press. You can purchase a copy of this book from IU Press at: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catal...

In Amma's Healing Room is a vivid and compelling study of the life and thought of a female Muslim spiritual healer, "Amma" to her family and disciples, who lives and practices in the city of Hyderabad in South India. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger describes Amma's practice as a form of vernacular Islam that has arisen in a particular locality, one in which the boundaries between Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are fluid. In the "healing room," Amma meets a diverse clientele that includes men as well as women, and people of various religious and social backgrounds. Seated at a small table, writing amulets in Arabic while her husband, "Abba," himself a Sufi master, operates a small store catering to the waiting crowd, Amma advises her disciples, who come to her with a wide range of physical, social, and psychological afflictions. Even as she declares that the most important distinction among humans is that of gender, not religion, Amma crosses those boundaries to practice in a traditionally male ritual role, and must continually recreate and maintain her authority as a healer to "meet the public."

Flueckiger's collaboration with Amma over a number of years is an integral part of the story she tells. Much of Amma's complex cosmology is presented in her own words. The author describes her research methods and growing understanding of her material in terms of a deepening relationship with Amma, to whom she relates at different moments as daughter, disciple, and researcher. The resulting study is a work of insight and compassion that challenges widely held views of religion and gender in India as it reveals the creativity of a tradition too often portrayed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as singular and monolithic.

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University. She is author of Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India and co-editor of Oral Epics in India and Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia.

ISBN 0-253-21837-3