Recent Scholarship: History of Medicine and Islamic Law

Earlier this month, the Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr published a detailed and richly illustrated interview with Khaled Fahmy (University of Cambridge) discussing his recent book, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt (UC Press, 2018).

Excerpt:

Focusing on changes in medicine and law in the 19th century and their mutual impacts, Fahmy suggests an alternative narrative of the formation of the modern Egyptian state. …

[Fahmy:] I wanted to write the story in a way that would make the body the main unit of analysis, because I’m talking about the human body and conflict over the body. … And so I decided I’d write five chapters corresponding to the five senses …

Let me move to the fifth chapter next, which is about touch. This chapter is about torture. I was trying to explain, after a discussion of the legal and medical systems, why torture was abolished at a certain point in judicial history, specifically, in 1861. What was the role of torture in the legal system? It wasn’t some secret practice; it was public but suddenly it was abolished. Why? I examined the law, and found a decree explicitly called the “Decree of replacing flogging with incarceration.” I kept noting how Foucauldian this was, with the prisons and autopsy. Prisons supplanted torture as a means of punishment, and autopsy replaced flogging as a means of obtaining confession and establishing proof. There was no longer any need for torture.

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