Books

• The Medieval Islamic Hospital (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

The book discusses the history of Islamic hospitals throughout the medieval period analyzing its different origins and various structures. The book investigates how hospitals affected medical practice by emphasizing experience and physical examination, and stimulating a focus on diseases as opposed to maintaining health. These changes anticipated the rise of modern medicine. The book was shortlisted for the Welch Medal (the most prestigious book prize in history of medicine)

• Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam (Routledge Press, 2018)

The book looks at how Muslim patients understood their bodies and their suffering at the intersection of medical and religious thought. It proposes piety as a key lens to understand how patients interacted with medical practitioners and how they understood diseases and cures. In follow-up articles, Ragab argued for piety as an important category in thinking about behaviors of modern and contemporary pious Muslim patients, and as a resource for thinking about Islamic medical ethics.

• Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh (Routledge Press, 2019)

The book traces the life and career of Ahmad al-Damanhuri—an important religious scholar and the rector of the biggest Islamic university in the Sunni world in the late eighteenth century. By looking at al-Damanhuri’s medical works, the book investigates the place of medicine and its connection to Islamic thought on the eve of the colonial encounter.

• Communities of Knowledge: A new history of science in Europe and Islamdom (Under contract with Princeton University Press)

Co-authored with Prof. Katharine Park, a leading historian of European science and medicine and holder of the Sarton Medal, the book looks to write a new history of science and medicine that crosses boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world, emphasizing connections, exchanges and various encounters.

• Around the Clock: Time in Islamic clinical cultures (Under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press)

The book investigates the place of time as an epistemic and cultural category in medical thought and practice. It looks at how time is articulated in a variety of contexts, from how physicians spent their times, learning, studying and examining patients, how they managed the time of clinical practice, to how they understood seasonal variations, astrological and astronomical changes, to how they viewed aging, disease progress, acuteness and chronicity, as well as the place of time in defining gender categories.