Eating for health and in illness

This lesson asks you to explain why certain eating practices are linked to preventing and managing particular health conditions. The museum offers one legal text, a jurists' rule on keeping the sick from what harms them; it gives its own reason but no medical or nutritional account, which comes from your class's sources. The text is history and law, not dietary or medical advice; someone who is ill should follow a doctor's advice. ¹

In the text, find what the sick person eats or avoids, and what it says should guide the decision. Then compare it with the reasons your class finds in nutrition sources.

Read how the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence places diet inside a wider question: whether treatment is to be sought at all. In the record of tadawi it divides treatment into two kinds. Treatment by action includes suitable foods, medicines and drugs, and bloodletting, cautery, cupping and surgery; treatment by abstention is a diet, refraining from what increases or brings on the disease ². For the ruling the jurists cite the hadith of Usama ibn Shurayk: "Treat yourselves, for God has not set down a disease without setting down a cure for it, except one: old age." ³ The record of hamiyya says that hamiyya lexically means prohibition and that it is a lawful form of treatment ⁴. This is the jurists' classification of an act, not guidance for anyone on what to eat or do when ill.

In the record of tadawi the encyclopaedia gives the schools' positions on seeking treatment. The Hanafis and Malikis hold it permitted; the Shafi'is, al-Qadi, Ibn Aqil and Ibn al-Jawzi among the Hanbalis hold it recommended; most Hanbalis hold leaving it better, as nearer to trust in God ⁵. Ibn al-Qayyim argued that the command to treat does not contradict trust in God, and that leaving the means weakens trust; trust requires taking the means ^{5 2}. These are classifications by jurists, reported with their holders, and the museum decides nothing between them.

The Kuwaiti encyclopaedia gathers the rulings of the schools and names their holders ⁵. It cites hadith by the names of those who reported them, here Abu al-Darda and Usama ibn Shurayk ³, and the museum's record gives neither the collection nor the grade. For diet it says that it must follow the principles of medicine and sound experience ⁶, and the record names no physician and no study. These texts witness what the jurists ruled and what they cited, not what a diet does in the body.

Ibn al-Qayyim holds that the command to treat does not contradict trust in God ⁵, while most Hanbalis hold that leaving treatment is better, as nearer to trust ⁵. Both start from trust in God. How can two views reach different conclusions from one starting point, and why does the starting point alone not settle the ruling?

• Hamiyya (diet and abstention in illness): the word in the lexicon, and what the record says of Ibn al-Qayyim and the principles of medicine.
• Seeking treatment (tadawi): the schools' positions on whether to seek treatment, the kinds of treatment and where the jurists differ.
• The physician: what the record says of treatment beginning with diet and regimen, then bloodletting and cupping.

Read hamiyya. Make a table with three columns: the example, the change in eating, and the reason the text gives.