Virtues and Passions: Medicine as Ethics in the Modernist Islamic Movement of Late Colonial Indonesia

• In Event: 132. Putting Bodies to Work: New Directions in the History of Colonial Medicine in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper examines how one modernist Islamic organization in late colonial Indonesia—the Muhammadiyah—employed modern medical and hygienic discourse and practice in pursuit of a wider devotional and ethical project that was both progressive and revivalist in nature. From examining the case of the Muhammadiyah, we may observe a mutually constitutive and contingent relationship between religious revivalism and medical modernity, as both fit together within a shared devotional and ethical project. Thus, if the current historiography on modern medicine and religion tends to tell stories of the separations of medicine and religion, body and soul, the pragmatic and the moral in the modern world—and also of the formation of the ‘secular’ as a concept founded upon those separations—this paper tells a story of their enduring overlaps and isomorphisms. Muslim reformers of the late colonial period used themes of medicine and hygiene to ground a modernist project that blurred the boundary between the secular and the religious, rather than embraced it as a starting point. This paper will examine in particular how two ethical concepts served to keep the above binary categories from separating: virtues and passions. Both proved just as comfortable in the realm of religious devotion as in the realm of health and hygiene and in fact served to integrate the two fields. They turned medicine into ethics and ethics into medicine and in doing so confounded the separations of body and soul, medicine and religion, the pragmatic and the moral.

Author

• Kevin Ko, University of Michigan