Claiming the public soul: representations of Qur'anic healing and psychiatry in the Egyptian print media.

Egyptian society is engaged in a culture-wide debate over definitions of abnormality, local constructions of which are rooted in ideas about the body and the soul in relation to society as a whole. This is reflected in the continuing recourse to religious healers or texts, as well as in heated debates over the moral, social, religious and legal status of religious healers, in particular the relatively recent and more orthodox "Qur'anic healers." The present study used a primarily qualitative analysis of Egyptian newspaper articles to explore media portrayals of this debate with a focus on how these contradictory cultural themes are situated and contested. The results show that psychiatric hegemony is reflected in media language that gives primacy to certain discourses over others, but that religious healing and religion in general exert an equal, if not more powerful influence on the form of these media portrayals. Different strategies used to negotiate the tensions between Qur'anic healing and psychiatry by those on both sides of the argument come across in the ways these arguments are portrayed in the media.