Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya

He was a jurist, the closest student of Ibn Taymiyya, and he sat with his teacher in the citadel of Damascus in prison. That of all people he is loved among physicians to this day is owed to a book that is part of his great work Zād al-Maʿād. It is called aṭ-Ṭibb an-Nabawī, prophetic medicine.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who died in 751 after the Hijra in Damascus, grew up in the scholarly milieu of his city, around the Madrasa al-Jawziyya, which his father administered and which gave him his name. For seventeen years he accompanied Ibn Taymiyya. In aṭ-Ṭibb an-Nabawī he joins the transmission of the Prophet ﷺ with rational medicine, without the one crowding out the other.

His central thought is of great clarity. He affirms the chain of cause and effect, al-asbāb wa-l-musabbabāt. To take the remedy, to let oneself be treated, does not contradict Tauḥīd but belongs to it, for Allah Himself made the cure a sabab, a cause that He placed in creation. He cites for this the word of the Prophet ﷺ: “For every illness there is a remedy. When the remedy meets the illness, healing comes about by the permission of Allah.”

And he is strict in ethics. Whoever practices medicine without having learned it is liable; he is ḍāmin, responsible for the harm of his hand.

aṭ-Ṭibb an-Nabawī is no slender tract but an entire compendium, spread across dozens of chapters. Ibn Qayyim arranges there far more than isolated maxims: the instruction neither to enter nor to leave a land struck by plague, centuries before the word quarantine; the honey that the Qurʾān names as a remedy and that he describes at length as food, drink, sweet and salve at once; the black cumin seed in which, according to the transmission, there lies healing for every illness except death; along with bloodletting and cupping (ḥijāma), dietetics, affliction of the soul, and the basic rule that prevention precedes treatment. He weaves this together with the Galenic and Avicennian medicine of his own time, and he is strict in his selection. As a trained critic of Ḥadīth he examines every transmission he cites, and he sorts out what circulates among the people as prophetic medicine but is not established.

For Ibn Qayyim the medicine of the Prophet ﷺ is thereby more than merely useful knowledge among much else. He writes in Zād al-Maʿād: “The medicine of the Prophet ﷺ is certain, definitive, springing from revelation, from the lamp of prophethood and the perfection of the intellect. The medicine of others, by contrast, is for the most part conjecture, supposition and experiment.” Where other physicians grope and err, this art of healing rests for him on a ground that does not waver.

In one sentence Ibn Qayyim sums up his entire thought. The pivot of all sciences rests on the knowledge of Allah, His command, and His creation. The medicine of the body and the medicine of the heart are for him two halves of a single art. To study the art of healing means to study the creation of Allah. Knowledge and faith are no opposition; they are one and the same movement of the heart toward its Creator.

This is the sum of his teaching and perhaps the sum of our profession. Apply the remedy with all the skill you have, the sabab, and at the same time know who the Healer is. For us as physicians, everything is contained in that.