In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India (Indiana University Press 2006; recipient of Georgia Author of the Year). Centers on the healing practice of a female Muslim healer, whom Flueckiger calls “Amma”, in the city of Hyderabad. The book analyzes the ways in which Amma negotiates gender and authority as she practices in a ritual, authoritative position traditionally limited to men. Amma often said that she could not engage with this practice without the permission of her husband Abba, who was a Sufi shaykh, an assertion that became quite clear after he passed away.

Flueckiger describes Amma’s healing practice as a form of what she calls “vernacular Islam”, arising in a particular geographic, social, and historical context. Here, the boundaries between Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity intersect in the healing room where Amma meets a diverse clientele that includes men and women, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian, of varied social backgrounds, who bring a wide range of physical, social, and psychological afflictions. Her patients share a worldview that acknowledges the effects of spiritual forces (including evil eye) on the human body and the power of religious healing to intervene. The ethnography challenges widely held views of rigid religious and gender boundaries in India and reveals the creativity of a religious tradition often portrayed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as singular and monolithic.

Amma’s husband passed away in 1998 And Amma in 2001. They were buried on family property at what used to be the outskirts of Hyderabad in an uninhabited “jungli” expanse of land filled with thorn bushes. Over the years, a lively neighborhood has grown up around the grave site that has transformed from an open air single grave to an enclosed, dome-topped shrine housing Amma and Abba’s graves to which worshippers come for healing. Flueckiger regularly returns to Hyderabad and has documented the growth of Amma and Abba’s grave-shrine (dargah). Hyderabad is filled with larger and small dargahs with undocumented histories; this unique and visual archive shows us a dargah in the making, over many years, and In Amma’s Healing Room documents the stories of those who are buried there.