This research examines ethnomedical attributes of the zar cult in Sudan. The research will set forth a working definition of zar and the historical, cultural, and religious context in which the zar originated, and then discuss how it functions as both cultural artifact and healing-therapy utility in the lives of those involved in it.
It is impossible to understand how zar functions among Muslim women in Sudan without also understanding something about the position of women in Islamic and Sudanese culture more generally. A famous verse of the Koran articulates the governing principle in the society.
Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance): for Allah is Most High, Great (above you all) (Koran, 4.34).
Combine this belief with the practical fact that, in the Sudan as ruled since the early 1980s is fundamentally a theocracy. It has been formally governed by the sharia, or Islamic religious law. As Croutier says, "Islam holds women in particularly low esteem, considering them intellectually dull, spiritually vapid, valuable only to satisfy the passions of their masters and provide them male heirs. 'Woman is a field, a sort of property that a husband may use or abuse as he sees fit,' says the Koran" (Croutier 20). This doctrine of women, recognizable in the history of Islamic countries to the present day, is consistent with such traditions as polygamy, slavery, and the purdah (formerly harem, in its broadest sense configured as the confinement of women to the dom...