Disturbing Spirits

Anglophone and Francophone scholars who have worked on healing in the twentieth century Middle East have largely studied either psychiatry or spirit-based healing, but they have rarely studied both and their connection to political changes. The development of psychiatric treatment in the Middle East has largely been a story told through French, British, or American roles in developing asylums, hospitals, and schools, or through regional efforts to combat foreign control, as with Mehmet ʿAli’s schools and army in Egypt. While historians focus on psychiatric institutions, anthropologists analyze the culturally specific role of jinn (spirits) and magic, with some brief forays into the nebulous area between Jinn-possession and psychiatric notions of mental illness. Anthropologist Celia Rothenberg, for example, notes a 1996 report where Palestinian Psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj (director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program [GCMHP]) considered political context important to etiology and treatment, but he did not “recogniz[e] the role of sheikhs in ‘curing’ patients of their problems.”

Scholars cannot fully comprehend the significance of psychiatric history to the development of the modern Syrian and Lebanese states without considering the political contexts of natural and supernatural understandings of mental illness. This study challenges the binary nature of research that separates foreign from local spaces of knowledge and practice, and it joins other histories of medicine and psychiatry that, as Matthew Heaton notes, “break down artificial dichotomies between colonizer/colonized, traditional/modern, and science/belief at local and national levels.”

These issues present conceptual difficulties in the Eastern Mediterranean as in other parts of the world, particularly in areas with minority groups and a history of repressive rule. One must avoid an oversimplified narrative of suffering and exploitation at the hands of cruel, racist, or imperialist doctors, as well as an oversimplified narrative of heroic resistance to the medical encounter. Steven Epstein’s concept of biopolitical citizenship moves beyond such binaries to highlight how “political issues of justice and equality get worked out in a biomedical domain.” Applying this to the Syrian and Lebanese context can highlight how war, repression, sectarianism, and medical marginalizing of nonmedical practices produced silences and traumas. The binary of suffering and resistance is one challenge for historians. Another is balancing two simultaneous historiographic agendas. The first deconstructs positivist attitudes towards science and culture, as science is the product of complex cultural formations.

The other agenda challenges essentialist views about static “Islamic” cultures or sciences by showing they (like cultures and sciences outside the Islamic world) are dynamic and organic processes. The book frames arguments about healing in the later chapters within the traumatic legacies wrought by political upheavals addressed in the early chapters. It moves from discussion of health and treatment in the early twentieth century, World War I, and the French Mandate period to analysis of continuities and ruptures in treatment during and after political upheavals of the postcolonial periods, particularly the 1958 “crisis” in Lebanon, the coups and Baʿathist repression in Syria, the Lebanese Civil War and the Syrian civil war. This postcolonial period (from the late 1940s to the post-9/11 Middle East) has witnessed numerous important political and economic changes in Greater Syrian society that continue to shape a diverse health arena.