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After tracing the main features of the foundational ethical perspectives and their relationship to the rise of medical practice in early Islam, the paper focuses on the development of the moral concept of adab. This concept served as an important tool in defining and shaping an ethical tradition based on the integration of the Hippocratic tradition into Muslim medicine and its underlying moral values. The existence of plural therapeutic systems and their moral and theological sources are also noted and an attempt is made to show how all of these diverse modes co-existed through most of the pre-modern history of medicine among Muslims. The paper ends by outlining the impact the European colonial and cultural encounter with the World of Islam had, in creating a duality in medical practice, education and institutions, thus limiting sustained and meaningful discourse between modern medical science and the ethical values of Islam.

The aspirations and problems of contemporary Muslims both in Africa and elsewhere have been variously formulated as "the challenge of the Modem Age to Islam," the modernization of technologically backward and traditional societies, or in even broader terms as a tension that is by no means peculiar to Islam. 1) Whereas the varied uses of terminology to express properly the nature of the problem may be questioned, we can agree in principle that since the onset of the so-called period of modernization, there has come about in the minds of concerned Muslims a certain new motivation. 2) This has led them to consider and evaluate Islam, as they had come to believe in it and practice it, in terms of their ability to revitalize their faith, in dealing with the emerging existential situation. 3) This essay, then, is concerned largely with analyzing this motivation as it has been reflected within the Nizari Ismaili community of East Africa and relating this to the wider issue of the processes by which a specific Muslim group has been able to effect change. The