In Amma's Healing Room by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

Author:Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger [Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9780253218377
Google: nbjwAAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1112628
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2006-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Amma’s Qualifications as a Female Healer

Both Amma and Abba agree that Amma’s access to her particular healing profession, particularly meeting the ‘public’, is first dependent upon Abba’s ritual/religious position as a murśid. Amma’s position as pirānimā is a minimal, albeit not sufficient, requirement for her ritual role, and few pirānimās become healers. Abba asserted many times that it was only with his permission that Amma could sit in this position; if he took that permission away, she would have to stop. Early in my fieldwork in 1990, I asked Amma if the young man sitting across the table from her was her disciple [murīd]. She seemed hesitant to respond but finally said “No, not really.” The young man interjected, “I am a disciple of both Amma and Abba.” During those first days that I sat at her healing table, Amma seemed to have difficulty acknowledging to me (perhaps because I was an outsider) that she had her own disciples, since this is part of the role of a pīr but not of the role of a pirānimā. However, by the end of the seven weeks I spent with her in 1990–1991 and in the years that followed, she talked of her disciples more easily. Both Amma and her disciples experience her as a guru/teacher; however, this is not a formalized, named role available to her as a woman in these contexts.

While literacy is seldom a requisite in mystical traditions such as the Sufi tradition to which Amma and Abba belong, it is a requisite of the particular healing system within which Amma practices, and it is the qualification Amma often emphasizes in differentiating herself from other female healers. It also distinguishes her from Abba, who does not and cannot fill the role of healer because he is not literate in the Arabic script. The requirement of this level of literacy stands in stark contrast to that required of many male and female Hindu healers whose authority (and diagnoses and prescriptions for patient action) is derived from possession by the goddess and has no orientation toward a written text. Abba says he had an opportunity in his youth to learn the Arabi script but at that point in his life he simply had no interest in it; he proudly added, however, that he did learn the ‘roman’ script when he served in the British army during the ‘German war’. Two of his brothers are also murśids, but they know Arabi script and use it in healing practices.

Amma’s literacy in Arabi script is not unique for Muslim women of her generation; many were given a traditional education at home (a few in secular schools) so that they could read the Quran. Arabi literacy is increasing among younger women in Hyderabad, who acquire it in both formal and informal educational settings. However, even among younger women, Amma’s active use and manipulation of the script—the production of writing—is unusual; such manipulation of pen to paper characterizes a male sphere of ritual activity from which women are excluded.

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