Two remedies: cupping and honey

This lesson asks you to identify alternative therapies used to treat human health conditions and to assess how well one of them works. The museum offers two therapies, cupping and honey, as the jurists' encyclopaedia records them: what they are and how the jurists rule on them. The encyclopaedia gives no measurement of effect, so assessing effectiveness is the class's own inquiry. The museum gives no medical advice: cupping involves cutting the skin, and what works is a matter for medical research and professionals. ¹

Write what you would measure, in whom, and compared with what, before saying that a remedy works. Then check which of these the record supplies.

Read the definition and the ruling as the record on cupping gives them, and notice that the language is legal, not medical. Hijama is the drawing of blood by suction after the skin has been cut with a cupping instrument; it differs from fasd, which is opening a vein ². Jurists regard cupping as recommended for treatment, on the basis of hadiths in the two Sahih collections ². Most jurists allow cupping as a paid trade, while a view attributed to Ahmad disapproves of the fee; the cupper is not liable if he performs the task skilfully and within what is customary ³. In the record on honey, using honey as medicine is permitted ⁴. These are rulings that the two records report; neither measures an effect in a patient.

The record reports a disagreement between the schools on cupping and fasting, which is a legal ruling and not medical guidance. The Hanafis dislike it for a fasting person who is weakened; the Malikis judge by the person's strength and likelihood of harm; the Shafi'is hold that it does not break the fast; the Hanbalis hold that it breaks the fast for both the cupper and the cupped ⁵. The schools also differ on whether it breaks wudu': the Hanafis treat it as breaking; the Hanbalis require wudu' for heavy bleeding; the Malikis and Shafi'is do not require it ⁶. Each view is attributed to its school as the record gives it, and the record does not choose between them.

Both records rest on one source, al-Mawsu'a al-Fiqhiyya al-Kuwaitiyya, a jurists' encyclopaedia that reports what each school holds, cited by volume and page ^{2 4}. What it names as the basis for cupping is hadiths in the two Sahih collections, not a study or a measurement ². In the record on the physician, the TDV encyclopaedia says that medical practice rested on the theory of the four humours, and that treatment began with diet and regimen, then moved to bloodletting, cupping and the expulsion of excess by medicines ⁷. It adds that works on the Prophetic medicine also arose, and that jurists gathered medical sayings from the hadith collections into books ⁷. All of these witness what was said and done, not what was measured. Ask what would have to be measured, in whom, and compared with what, before anyone could say that a treatment works.

The record on cupping says that jurists regard it as recommended for treatment on the basis of hadiths in the two Sahih collections, and the record on honey says that using honey as medicine is permitted; neither measures an effect. Say which question each kind of source answers: what the schools rule, or what a treatment changes. Take a position on whether one can stand in for the other, and answer the strongest objection to it: if jurists regard a treatment as recommended, is that not already evidence that it works?

• Cupping: the definition and the schools' rulings on wudu', fasting, ihram and the fee.
• Honey: the word in the lexicon, the ruling on its use as medicine and the rulings on its zakat.
• The physician: how physicians were trained and practised, and what the TDV encyclopaedia says of the humours and of Prophetic medicine.

Read the record on cupping and the record on honey. For each, list what the entry states and what it leaves unmeasured.