The advent of Islamic culture is well defined by the life of the founder of Islam, Muhammad (c. 570 to 632). Shortly after his death, Muslim Arabs began a series of dramatic conquests of the Middle East and North Africa, so that by A.D. 750 their hegemony stretched from Andalusia (southern Spain) to the Sind (modern Pakistan). Islam was gradually established as the predominant religion in these areas, and Arabic became the preeminent language in most of them. In the later Middle Ages, Islam spread appreciably in sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia; the only areas in which it retreated were the Iberian Peninsula and eastern Europe.

Most of our information about disease has been derived from literary sources, including Muslim hagiography and medical texts. The former are biased toward urban conditions, although the majority of the population lived in the countryside at a subsistence level and often at the mercy of nomadic depredations. The medical works have the serious disadvantage of being largely nonclinical and highly derivative of classical medical texts, and the anecdotes of renowned physicians are frequently apocryphal. Yet major features of a “pathological tableau” do emerge, in which illness is inextricably tied to poverty as both cause and effect. Blindness is conspicuous, particularly in Egypt; the result of a number of diseases, blindness seems to have afflicted a large percentage of the population, and the blind were traditionally employed as Koran reciters in mosques. Deafness was often congenital, and mutism was associated with nervous disorders. Paralysis, epilepsy, and mental disorders are frequently described in the medical and nonmedical texts, which include surviving magical incantations and prayers directed against demonic possession.