Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the healing practice of a Naqshabandi Mufti in Delhi from 2005-2013, this paper analyzes such healing as a method of adjudication in which embodied language produces new sufi spaces with the power to transform lives.

Paper long abstract:

The Old Delhi mosque in which I have conducted fieldwork since 2005 is home to a popular mufti who offers "spiritual healing" to sufi and non-sufi Muslims, Hindus, and anyone else who approaches him for help with physical or familial troubles. This naqshabandi mufti prescribes various remedies for physical and relationship problems: he writes amulets to be worn, quran verses to be dissolved in water and drunk, and amulets to be placed under beds, hung in door frames, or worn in clothing. Each of these remedies encourages troubled subjects to knowingly or unknowingly ingest holy words that have the capacity to change them and their relationships. In this paper, I argue that this process of adjudication is predicated on the idea that holy words infuse the spaces into which it comes into contact, whether material objects, the air we breath, or living bodies. That the mufti prescribes these remedies to anyone who asks for help, regardless of community affiliation, and that they make of bodies, beds, and thresholds spaces capable of healing suggests both the power of language and the dynamism of sufi space in this healing tradition.