«Una cura veramente islamica». Progetti di soggetto e società nelle terapie musulmane in Mozambico

The Mozambican landscape of local therapies is characterized by a wide plurality of actors, who operate according to different traditions of knowledge and practice. Alongside biomedicine, a dense and organized community of traditional healers is flanked by the activities of independent and evangelical churches, that operate also as providers of various types of treatment. Although their practice has been the object of several studies, few contributions have focused specifically the therapies developed by Muslim healers, who are prevalent especially in the North of the country but also, in not negligible number, in the capital Maputo. Within this specific field, new practitioners and techniques have emerged recently, as a result of the global trends concerning the Muslim world. Moving from the case of a clinic in which exorcism and other practices are implemented as a way to perform a «truly Islamic therapy», I describe the main historical lines of development of Islamic practices of healing and show how each of them, well beyond their supposed common grounds, propose a different project of subjectivity and society.