Quick Answer
The book that introduced Western readers to the idea that Sufism has a medicine, and that the medicine is Greek humoral theory carried through Avicenna, combined with the Prophet's remedies, breath practice and the recitation of divine names. It is clear, warm, and practical about food and daily rhythm. It is also uncritical about its own sources, silent on where tradition ends and evidence begins, and thin on the Sufism it takes its title from. Read it for the system. Use it with care.
Key Takeaways
- Unani is Galen through Avicenna, and the book is a plain introduction to it.
- Four humours, four qualities, and treatment by opposites, mostly through food.
- Prophetic medicine supplies the remedies: honey, black seed, dates, cupping, fasting.
- Breath and the divine names are the Sufi contribution, and the most distinctive chapters.
- No line between tradition and evidence, which is the book's serious limit.
16 min read
What This Book Is
The Book of Sufi Healing was published by Inner Traditions in 1985 and has stayed in print since. It runs to around two hundred pages and is written for a general reader with no background in Islam, Sufism or traditional medicine.
Its subject is the approach to health that the author learned within the Chishti Sufi order and the Unani medical tradition of South Asia. The two are presented as a single system in which the body's balance, the spirit's condition and the remembrance of God are aspects of one thing.
The chapters move from principles, the humours and temperaments, through practice, food, herbs, fasting and breath, to the spiritual dimension, the divine names, the Quranic verses used in healing, and the illnesses of the heart.
It was, when it appeared, almost the only book in English on the subject, and for many readers it still is.
What Sufi healing means here. The title suggests a spiritual healing practice. What the book mostly contains is Unani medicine, the Greco-Arabic humoral tradition, framed by Sufi devotion. Readers expecting something like Reiki or energy work will find instead a diet, a pharmacopoeia and a theory of temperament, with the spiritual practices occupying the last third. That is the actual shape of the tradition and the book is honest about it.
Who Hakim Chishti Is
Hakim Moinuddin Chishti, born Robert Thomas Elliott in the United States in 1942, converted to Islam and was initiated into the Chishti order in the 1970s. He studied Unani medicine under practitioners in Pakistan and India, received the title of hakim, physician, and returned to establish a practice and teach.
He has written other books on Unani and on Islamic approaches to health, run a clinic, and taught courses for decades. His work is respected within the community of Western converts to Sufism and has been criticised, from both sides, for its blending of medical and religious claims.
The book reflects a convert's enthusiasm. It presents its tradition with warmth and without much distance, and a reader gets the system as a believer holds it rather than as a historian would describe it.
What Unani Medicine Is
The system at the centre of the book, and one most Western readers have never heard of.
Unani means Greek. The tradition descends from Hippocrates and Galen, was translated into Arabic in the ninth century, systematised by Avicenna in the Canon of Medicine, carried into India by Muslim rulers, and survives there as a living practice with its own colleges, hospitals and government recognition.
It is, in other words, the same medicine that Europe practised until the seventeenth century, preserved and developed in the Islamic world after Europe abandoned it. The humours, the qualities, the temperaments, the treatment by opposites: all of it is Galen.
The book explains this clearly, and one of its real services is to show a Western reader that the medicine of Chaucer's physician is still being practised in Delhi and Lahore, with Sufi devotion attached.
The Four Humours
The theoretical core, laid out in the early chapters.
The body contains four humours: blood, which is hot and wet; phlegm, cold and wet; yellow bile, hot and dry; and black bile, cold and dry. Each has its seat, its function and its season. Health is their proper proportion; disease is the excess, deficiency or corruption of one or more.
Every food, every herb, every activity and every climate has a temperament in the same terms, hot or cold and wet or dry, in degrees. Treatment consists in restoring balance by opposites: a cold, wet condition is treated with hot, dry foods and remedies.
The system is complete, internally consistent, and two thousand years old. The book presents it as true. A reader should hold it, at least, as a way of organising observation that worked well enough to dominate medicine for most of recorded history, and as a framework that still shapes how a billion people think about food.
Temperament and Diagnosis
Each person also has a temperament, a native balance of the humours, which determines their constitution, their vulnerabilities and what will suit them.
The book gives the classical signs: the sanguine person warm and ruddy, the phlegmatic pale and slow, the choleric lean and quick, the melancholic dark and thin. It describes how the hakim reads the pulse, examines the urine, and questions the patient about appetite, sleep, digestion and mood, and how the diagnosis is a reading of the whole person's balance rather than the naming of a disease.
Readers who know the four temperaments from Western sources will recognise the scheme, since it is the same one. The book's account of it is clear and its instructions for self-assessment are usable.
Food as the First Medicine
The longest and most practical part of the book.
Unani holds that food is the primary treatment and medicine the secondary. The book gives tables of foods by temperament, rules for combining and sequencing them, advice on the timing of meals, the value of fasting, and the foods appropriate to each season and each constitution.
Much of this is ordinary good sense in classical dress: eat moderately, eat according to the season, do not drink cold water with hot food, do not eat when agitated. Some of it is specific to the system: the temperaments of individual foods, the combinations to avoid, the correspondences between foods and organs.
The dietary chapters are where a reader is most likely to take something away and use it, and they are also where the book is safest, since the interventions are foods.
The Prophet's Remedies
The Islamic layer, which gives the tradition its authority for believers.
The hadith literature contains a large body of sayings attributed to the Prophet on health: that black seed is a cure for everything but death, that honey is a healing for people, that the best remedies are cupping and fasting, along with rules on cleanliness, on eating with the right hand, on not eating to fullness. Collected, these form Prophetic medicine, al-tibb al-nabawi, which Unani practitioners hold alongside the Galenic system.
The book draws on it throughout and treats it as authoritative. Honey, black seed, dates, olive oil, cupping and fasting appear as foundational remedies, and the sayings are given as reasons.
For a Muslim reader this is the heart of the matter. For another reader it is a window on how a religion's founder becomes its physician, and the book is a good place to see that happen.
The Herbal
A substantial section listing plants, their temperaments and their uses.
The herbs are mostly familiar from the Mediterranean and South Asian traditions: fennel, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, saffron, liquorice, senna, rose, and the black seed that recurs everywhere. Each is given with its temperament in degrees, its actions in humoral terms, and its applications.
The information matches the classical Unani pharmacopoeia and is presented without indication of dose, contraindication or interaction beyond the humoral logic. That is the tradition's way and it is a gap.
Fasting and Rhythm
A chapter that bridges the physical and the spiritual and deserves separate mention.
Fasting in Islam is a pillar of the faith, obligatory in Ramadan and recommended on other days through the year. The book treats it as medicine as well as devotion: a rest for the digestion, a clearing of the humours, a discipline of appetite, and a training of attention that carries into everything else.
Around fasting the book builds an account of daily rhythm: the five prayers as fixed points that structure the day, the times for eating and for sleep, the value of rising before dawn, the short rest after midday. The rhythm is presented as itself a treatment, on the argument that a body kept to a regular order needs less correction.
Of all the book's recommendations, this is the one with the widest agreement outside the tradition. The specifics are Islamic; the principle, that regularity of eating, sleeping and attention is the ground of health, is not contested by anyone.
Breath and the Nostrils
The chapter that is most specifically Sufi and least familiar.
The book teaches that the breath carries the life force, that it alternates in dominance between the right and left nostrils in a cycle through the day, that the right nostril is hot and solar and the left cold and lunar, and that the balance between them governs health and mood. Practices are given for shifting the dominant nostril, for breathing with awareness of the divine presence, and for combining breath with the names of God.
Readers will recognise the yogic doctrine of the nadis, and the book acknowledges the parallel. Within Sufism the practice has its own long history, especially in the Indian orders, and the Chishti tradition has a developed science of breath that the book only introduces.
This is the most usable spiritual practice in the book and the one that connects most directly to Sufi practice generally.
The Ninety-Nine Names
The chapter most readers come for.
Islam counts ninety-nine names of God, each expressing an attribute: the Merciful, the Healer, the Provider, the Patient, the Light. The Sufi orders use them in dhikr, remembrance, reciting one or several a set number of times as a practice of attention and invocation.
The book gives the names with their meanings and assigns to each a healing application: a name to recite for a specific illness, a specific emotional state, a specific need, with the number of repetitions. Al-Shafi, the Healer, for illness generally. Al-Latif, the Subtle, for anxiety. And so on through the list.
The correspondences come from the tradition of the orders, especially the Chishti and Qadiri, and are given here as received. The practice is real and old. Whether reciting a particular name a particular number of times affects a particular organ is a claim the book makes and does not examine.
The chapter on the names is best read as a chapter on attention. Whatever one thinks of the specific correspondences, the practice it describes is the sustained repetition of a single word that names a quality one lacks, with the breath, for a fixed period, daily. That is a discipline with effects that do not depend on the metaphysics, and it is the same discipline the Christian monks called the prayer of the heart and the Hindu tradition calls japa. The book gives the Islamic form of it, with a list, and the list is a way in.
Verses as Medicine
A short chapter on the use of Quranic verses in healing: recited over the patient, over water to be drunk, or written and worn. The Fatiha, the opening chapter, is given as the universal remedy, along with specific verses for specific conditions.
This is the oldest layer of Islamic healing, attested from the first generation, and it is the one most foreign to a secular reader. The book presents it as straightforwardly effective and does not distinguish between its devotional and its therapeutic dimensions.
A reader may take it as an account of what is done rather than as a recommendation, and as such it is informative.
The Illnesses of the Soul
The final section, and the one that connects the book to the Sufi tradition proper.
Sufism has a detailed psychology of the heart's diseases: pride, envy, greed, anger, hypocrisy, the love of the world, and the rest. The classical manuals, above all al-Ghazali's, treat each with its symptoms, its causes and its cure, in exact parallel to physical medicine.
The book gives a brief version of this, with the diseases of the heart listed and the remedies named: remembrance, fasting, service, the company of the righteous. It is short, and readers who want the full tradition will need to go to the sources.
What the section does is close the circle: the book began with the body's balance and ends with the soul's, and the claim throughout is that they are one balance.
Where the Sufism Is
A fair question about a book with Sufi in the title.
The Sufism is in the framing, in the breath chapter, in the names, and in the closing section on the soul. It is not in the humoral theory, the diet or the herbal, which are Unani and would be taught in the same form by a hakim with no Sufi connection.
The book's implicit argument is that Unani is the medicine the Sufis practise and that the Sufi path is the spiritual side of Unani. That is historically true of the Indian orders, which ran hospitals and trained physicians. But a reader who wants the Sufism of Rumi or of the classical teaching will find only a little of it here, and should not expect more.
Tradition and Evidence
The limit that must be stated.
The book does not distinguish between claims that have a basis in observation, claims that are received tradition, and claims that are devotional. All are presented in the same voice as fact. Honey has antibacterial properties; black seed has been studied and shows some activity; reciting a name for a kidney condition has not been studied and could not be.
A reader who knows this can sort the material. A reader who does not may take the book's confidence as evidence, and where serious illness is involved that could matter. The book has no warning to that effect and should have.
Beside Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine
Useful context for readers who know the other systems.
Unani is structurally closest to Ayurveda, with which it has exchanged material for a thousand years: both are humoral, both classify food by quality, both treat by opposites, and in India the two are taught in parallel colleges. Ayurveda has three doshas where Unani has four humours, and its spiritual framing is Hindu where Unani's is Islamic.
Chinese medicine shares the balance model and the emphasis on food but is built on different primitives, yin and yang and the five phases rather than four humours.
The book mentions these parallels lightly. A reader interested in traditional medicine generally will find Unani the least documented of the three in English, and this book remains one of the few introductions.
The Objections
Four, and they are the ones any careful reader will raise.
No line between tradition and evidence. Already discussed, and the most serious.
No dosage or safety information. The herbal gives temperaments and applications without the practical detail a reader would need to use it responsibly.
Thin on Sufism. The title promises more of the spiritual tradition than the book delivers.
Uncritical of its sources. The Prophetic remedies, the humoral theory and the correspondences of the names are all presented as settled, and none is.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know that Islamic civilisation has a medicine, what it is, and how it connects to the spiritual path.
Read it if you know Ayurveda or Chinese medicine and want the third great traditional system introduced simply.
Read it if you practise Sufism and want the tradition's account of the body and its care.
Read it with a second, more critical source beside it if you intend to act on any of the medical content.
The idea underneath the whole book is older than Islam and older than Galen: that health is balance, that balance is restored by opposites, and that the physician's first instrument is food and the second is the patient's attention. Everything else, the humours, the temperaments, the names, is an elaboration of that. Modern medicine abandoned the framework and kept some of the observations. What the book preserves, beyond the specifics, is the sense that the body's balance and the soul's are one balance, and that a person who eats badly, sleeps badly and remembers nothing beyond themselves is ill in a way no single treatment reaches. That idea does not need the humours to be true.
Galen through Avicenna, the Prophet's remedies, and the names of God: the medicine of the Sufi orders, introduced.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our reservations about the absence of any line between tradition and evidence are set out above and were not softened for the link. Nothing here is medical advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Book of Sufi Healing?
A 1985 introduction by Hakim Moinuddin Chishti to the healing traditions of the Islamic world as practised within Sufism: Unani humoral medicine, dietary rules, herbal remedies, breath, and the use of Quranic verses and divine names.
Who is the author?
An American convert, born Robert Thomas Elliott, initiated into the Chishti order and trained in Unani medicine in Pakistan and India. He founded a clinic and taught in the United States for decades.
What is Unani medicine?
The Greco-Arabic medical tradition descending from Hippocrates and Galen through Avicenna, based on four humours and four qualities, still practised across South Asia and officially recognised in India and Pakistan.
What are the four humours?
Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, each with a temperament of hot or cold and wet or dry. Health is their balance; illness is an excess or deficiency, treated by opposites in food and medicine.
What is Prophetic medicine?
The body of remedies and health practices attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in the hadith literature: honey, black seed, dates, cupping, fasting, and rules of diet and hygiene. The book draws on it throughout.
What does it say about breath?
That breath carries the life force, that the nostrils alternate in dominance through the day, and that specific breathing practices with the divine names can restore balance. This is the most explicitly Sufi part of the book.
What are the ninety-nine names?
The traditional names of God in Islam, each expressing an attribute. The book gives a list with their healing applications, to be recited a set number of times for particular conditions.
Are the remedies safe?
Most are foods, herbs and practices with a long record of use and low risk. Some recommendations, especially where they might replace medical treatment for serious illness, should be read as tradition rather than advice.
Is it a Sufi text or a medical text?
Both and neither fully. It presents medicine as a branch of the spiritual path and the spiritual path as the ground of health, and it is introductory on both sides.
How does it treat food?
At length. Foods are classified by temperament, combined and timed by humoral rules, and specific foods are recommended for specific conditions. The dietary chapters are the most practical in the book.
What is the Chishti order?
One of the major Sufi orders of South Asia, founded by Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer in the twelfth century, known for its music, its openness to all faiths and its service to the poor.
Who should read it?
Readers curious about Islamic and Sufi approaches to health, students of traditional medicine who want the Unani system introduced simply, and Sufi practitioners who want the physical side of the path addressed.
Start with the plate
The book's most usable teaching is its oldest: that what you eat, when, and in what state of mind is the first medicine, and that no remedy will do much for a person who gets that wrong. You do not need the humours to act on it. Eat according to the season. Do not eat when agitated. Stop before full. Fast sometimes. Pay attention to the breath while you do all of this. The tradition wraps these in a system and a devotion, and both may be worth having. The instructions stand on their own.
Sources & References
- Chishti, Hakim G. M. The Book of Sufi Healing, Inner Traditions, 1985.
- Avicenna. The Canon of Medicine, Book One, on the humours and temperaments.
- Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Medicine of the Prophet, the classical collection.
- Al-Ghazali. The Alchemy of Happiness, on the diseases of the heart.
- Studies of Unani medicine in South Asia and its institutional history.
- Scholarly literature on dhikr and the ninety-nine names in the Sufi orders.