Drinking the Written Qurʾan: Healing with Kombe in Zanzibar Town: Healing with Kombe in Zanzibar Town

Abstract

Drinking the Written Qur’an: Healing with Kombe in Zanzibar Town Summary of Hanna Nieber’s PhD thesis When Qur’anic verses, sometimes supplemented with certain names, drawings, or numbers, are written with saffron ink on a plain plate or a plain piece of paper and then washed off with water, this water then is trusted to contain the Qur’anic verses, including their healing power. In Swahili, this liquid is called kombe and it is referred to as dawa ya kiislamu (Islamic medicine). Building on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis engages with about Hakimu Saleh, Bi Mwana, Faki, Sara, Mama Sue, and many others who are introduced throughout this text. This thesis takes kombe as a topic and also forms it as a topic. It constitutes a written material product about writing that is materially liquefied and takes this relation into account: it is what I call a “diffractive ethnography.” Thus, rather than proposing that this thesis captures a “representation” of what happens in Zanzibar, I ethnographically also pay attention to how the form of my text (relying on visual readability) “diffracts” with its content (practices of affectively encountering a de-visualized text). Challenging the distinction between form and content, between matter and meaning, between ontology and epistemology, this “diffractive ethnography” of kombe in Zanzibar indicates that the way in which an academic text is written is not only a methodological question but becomes a concern that constitutes what the text is about. Following a mainly conceptual introduction, three parts follow: "Materializing Kombe," "Immediating Literacy," and "Enacting Dawa ya Kiislamu." The first part introduces kombe in its materiality and the two main settings in which fieldwork was conducted. The following chapter introduces the situatedness in Zanzibar and the third chapter reflexively delves into the theme of knowledge. The second part scrutinizes kombe’s mediation processes and attends to their diffraction. While chapter 4 is about text and chapter 5 about the body, chapter 6 brings the two preceding chapters together and engages with "reading bodies." Finally, the third part attends to social settings in which kombe is enacted as "Islamic medicine." In chapter 7, the focus is on "ya kiislamu" ("Islamic") and a discursively nurtured antagonistic ground for comparability of Muslims and Christians in Zanzibar. Chapter 8 ponders over dawa (medicine) as the realm in which the differentiating entanglement of “religion” and “dini” materializes and enables both Muslims and Christians to drink kombe—as dawa. Finally, the conclusion explicitly relates three crosscutting themes. One of them is the importance of kombe’s materiality, the second is the Zanzibari context where the research for this ethnographic endeavor was conducted and the third crosscutting theme is the theme of knowledge. As “diffractive ethnography,” this thesis is not (just) about kombe but is shaped through kombe (its materiality, its ethnographic context, its presence in this academic contribution). This thesis manifests the phenomenon of kombe-as-a-topic.