Medicine for the heart: the embodiment of faith in Morocco

"Medicine for the Heart" is a Moroccan way of describing the power of the Quran to heal the heart, an organ and symbol that links spiritual, emotional, and physical experience. The recitation of Quranic verses offers housewives living in southeastern Saharan Morocco a way to manage emotions associated with recent social changes--emotions that distress the heart and the body. This article is a preliminary examination of how, in everyday life, the phenomenology of faith illuminates an embodied structure of well-being, where spiritual experience merges with physical and emotional experience. Combining the perspectives of the anthropology of experience and social psychology, I highlight some of the spiritual aspects of well-being that emerge in the household production of health, particularly in relation to the core cultural values of unity and interiority. The concept of the spiritual body locates this experience inside the body (in this case radiating from the heart) rather than outside (i.e., in cognitive or symbolic space).