Charles, great question. Unfortunately this little anecdote is very short and doesn’t give much detail. Din Muhammad transliterates the word “homeopathy” into the Arabic script and simply uses it as one might use the word in English. This is actually fairly common practice in Pashto, so there’s nothing particularly strange about this word being borrowed. As for Mawlawi Salim, if I remember correctly, Salim never shows up again in the biography, so this is all very mysterious. For what it’s worth, part of Khalis’s healing methods seem to have involved the use of pills. Din Muhammad never really says exactly what these are, or whether Khalis made them himself, so it’s not clear what conclusions we can draw. Frankly, I put this here mostly because a) there is very little discussion of the medical practices of the mujahidin in Afghanistan in general and b) the idea that Khalis might have had a reputation as a healer is totally new in the West as far as I can tell…

When you say “homeopathic” are you referring to the remedies developed by Hahnemann in particular, or to herbalism, folk remedies etc in general – as opposed to western allopathic medicine? I can even imagine there might be some ayurvedic influence, given Khalis’s pre-partition early education, and wonder how segregated “western” (allpathic), “hindu” (ayurvedic) and “Muslim” (herbal / magical) medicines might be in daily practice. What do Mawlawi Salim’s books take for the basis of their approach?

QUOTE: Din Muhammad’s point is not that Khalis was a miracle worker. Once he establishes that Khalis actually understood something about medicine, Din Muhammad uses this to make a larger point about Khalis’s character: he was generous with his time, skills, and treasure, and he did not charge the poor for his services. :UNQUOTE

That’s particularly telling, in terms of the Islamic emphasis on what Catholics would call “works of corporeal mercy” – something Maqdisi seems to emphasize too.

Indeed, your point that “there are systems of knowledge and ways of approaching learning in the Afghan frontier that are both vital and important to local communities, and almost totally unanalyzed in the West” would appear to me to have resonance across a far wider field than Afghanistan alone, though I understand that’s your own focus.

Peter Chilton’s piece on the Dogon in FP today, for instance, doesn’t even mention the extensive anthropological interest in Dogon culture and diversity, as represented in authors ranging from the programmatic but fascinating Marcel Griaule via the criticisms of Mary Douglas to the recent overview by Huib Blom.

Your “systems of knowledge and ways of approaching learning” are “almost totally unanalyzed in the West” because we’re trained to think vertically, keeping within disciplinary boundaries, rather than horizontally, moving across them…

Cross-disciplinary awareness, it seems to me, present special problems (cf dispute over Griaule’s work on Dogon cosmology), but surely we need to be addressing rather than ignoring them.