Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi, a reformist Islamic scholar, was very much part of his times in his urgent concern with women’s potential role in individual and societal “improvement,” the goal of the enormously successful encyclopedic work that included the chapter considered here. Thanawi’s teachings included generic elite male “best practices” on health and ethics, undergirded by Greco-Arabic humoral medicine in its Indian form. His text caught a historical moment when medical treatments were more craft than industrial, and when the professionalization of discrete Muslim and Hindu “systems” of Unani Tibb and Ayurveda, with Ayurveda increasingly incorporated into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, was only incipient. Health maintenance in Thanawi’s hands was a matter of empowering women to both spiritual and practical competence and responsibility, freeing them from resort to (as he saw it) quacks, ignorant midwives, and untrained women, along with dubious healers and holy men, Muslim or Hindu or any other. In its description of challenges, strategies, and resources related to health, his text offers a window into women’s everyday world. But it also raises comparative questions about the history of medicine, the history of emotions, ethnicity in a colonial context, and the potentially empowering implications of Islamic socio-religious reform for women.

Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi 是一位改革派伊斯兰学者，他迫切关注女性在个人和社会“改善”中的潜在作用，这是包括此处所讨论的章节在内的极为成功的百科全书工作的目标。Thanawi 的教义包括关于健康和道德的通用精英男性“最佳实践”，以印度形式的希腊-阿拉伯体液医学为基础。他的文字抓住了一个历史性的时刻，当时医学治疗更多的是工艺而非工业，当 Unani Tibb 和 Ayurveda 的离散穆斯林和印度教“系统”的专业化，以及 Ayurveda 越来越多地融入多数主义的印度教民族主义时，这才刚刚起步。Thanawi 手中的健康维护是赋予女性精神和实践能力和责任感的问题，使他们免于求助于（如他所见）庸医、无知的助产士和未经训练的妇女，以及可疑的治疗师和圣人，穆斯林或印度教徒或任何其他人。在描述与健康相关的挑战、策略和资源时，他的文字提供了一个了解女性日常生活的窗口。但它也提出了关于医学史、情感史、殖民背景下的种族以及伊斯兰社会宗教改革对妇女的潜在赋权影响的比较问题。