NOOR JOURNAL

Editor's Note

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Before the Knowledge Fades

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By Dr. Qaisar J. Qayyum, Chief Editor, Noor Journal

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The old books of Hikmat hold a high order of medical knowledge. They were written by physicians who spent their lives at the bedside and recorded what they saw and what worked. In Bayaz Noor-ud-Din, the notebook of Hazrat Hakeem Noor-ud-Deen (1841–1914), the author describes a mild pain at the heart that travels to the arm and, in some patients, as far as the little finger. He also writes that for dropsy arising from the heart he has found no better medicine than digitalis. Any clinician today will recognize both.

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This knowledge is fading, and for several reasons at once. The physicians who can read these books with ease are fewer each year. The generation that follows them was trained in English and cannot read the Arabic, Persian, and old Urdu in which the tradition was written. The books themselves have come down through handwritten copies and reprints, and errors have entered the text along the way.

 

The practical knowledge that once passed from teacher to student, how a plant is identified and how a remedy is prepared, is passed on less and less. And the system of thought behind it all, which classifies disease by cause and mizaj (temperament), is unfamiliar to modern readers, so what they cannot place they tend to set aside.

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None of these losses is sudden, and that is why they are easy to ignore. But a book that no one can read is as good as lost. If we do not save this knowledge now, it may not reach the generations that come after us.

 

Saving it means more than keeping the books. It means carrying them accurately into the language and terms of the modern age. That is slow work. A single page may mix Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English. A single misplaced dot can change the name of a disease or the size of a dose. Many old terms have no exact modern equivalent, and the translator must neither force them into a modern diagnosis nor discard them.

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The Noor Journal has taken up this work. In March we opened the Makhzan al-Mufradat. We are now publishing the Index of Diseases of the Bayaz in English, with each heading checked against the author's own text and set beside the original Urdu. Where a modern term fits only in part, we say so. Where none exists, we let the old term stand. Our aim is to learn what these physicians knew, not to pass a verdict on them.

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We cannot do this alone. If you trained as a hakim, or read Persian or Arabic, or know the old plant names and weights, we invite you to join us.

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The hakims wrote these books so that the next physician would not have to begin again. It falls to us to see that the next generation can still read them.

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Dr. Qaisar J. Qayyum, MD
Chief Editor, Noor Journal of Complementary and Contemporary Medicine
Internal Medicine and Geriatric Medicine, Oklahoma, USA