Paper short abstract:

The global spread of Islamic medicine had to adjust to new technologies long before the digital communication revolution. So-called interruptions did not necessarily disturb medical communication and treatment but regulated it like prosody, an example of which is given of Muslim healers in East Africa.

Paper long abstract:

'Global public health' needs to include the great sweep of Islamic and other indigenous healing systems as well as that of biomedicine. The paper accordingly draws on material from the East African coastal area and compares two kinds of healers operating before the current use of mobile phones and the internet. It is therefore a snapshot taken before the digital communication revolution and so offers itself for later comparison. Though both Muslim, one healer is rural and speaks both the lingua franca, Swahili, and a local vernacular, while the other is urban and speaks both a Swahili high diatype and Arabic. Although distinguished ethno-linguistically by clients, their two healing traditions are in effect a continuum of diagnostic and treatment possibilities. The Arabo-Swahili healer constantly receives phone calls from his landline which he answers while treating a patient, and the Mijikenda healer punctuates his spirit invocations and treatment with movements and unrelated comments to those around him. These interruptions or punctuations are incorporated in the medical discourse. They stage the whole therapeutic process by acting as its meta-prosody.