Abdur Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera – Valuable Advice for Doctors and Physicians
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Smilla Rahmanir Rahim hamdulillah hamdulillah in Hamden, Cathy on
the uban Mubarak and fie Mubarak and Ali.
Can now your headboard I'm gonna weigh out of the Jalla Jalla, who
I'm unaware of was Salatu was Salam ala say you didn't have you
been Mustafa sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sahbihi wa barakato cell
limit asleep Sleeman Kathira en la AMI Dean, Amma band. Salam
aleikum, wa Rahmatullah to all of you.
I don't know what kind of mindset you've come with today, because I
know it's your award ceremony, during the award ceremony, you've
come after without cramming anything without preparing your
mind to work very hard.
You've come just to relax and just receive awards. So
I think while taking that into consideration,
and also, I've come very late into the game here. So I don't really
know what you have studied so far. Because
I wasn't able to consult a lot of the material yet. Judging from the
one PowerPoint that I did look at, it looks like you've covered a lot
of ground. However, I think it's going to be after this session
that I'm probably gonna get filled in much more. So.
Number three, I wasn't given a very specific topic to deal with
either, like, Okay, you must speak about this topic or that topic. So
I've just come here, literally, with just some very disparate
ideas that I've thrown together. Hopefully, they make some sense.
There's some cohesiveness about them. And
we'll just see how it goes in sha Allah.
So I just like to confess where I'm coming from, just so you don't
expect.
So in sha Allah,
I asked.
You see, for me to look at a doctor, I think doctors play a
very, very important and people's important
position in people's lives.
I mean, I'm sure you know that. But I think
it's very similar to scholars as well.
We play also a very important
place in people's life, we have very important place. And the
reason is
people are going through maybe a religious crisis, a spiritual
crisis. So when they consult a scholar, depending on the way that
I react, I could be
either consoling that person
I could be maybe removing their confusion that they have
reassuring them, or I could be actually
making their situation worse.
Sometimes people have told me that so and so is
not. He's not very happy with you. So what happened I don't remember
any such interaction where may have
said something wrong, though. So apparently, what had happened was,
as an island, you're coming out of the masjid. And about five people
are waiting to speak to you.
And you see that, so you're trying to get through everybody. And each
person has different expectations.
They want you to give the full time they want to have a
conference with you, you know, standing outside, which is totally
inappropriate. But that's people's expectations. So you try to
quickly finish the discussion by giving them quick, quick, short,
sharp, sharp replace, but some people are sensitive. So they get
a bit upset.
And then they say scholars are like this. And, you know, they're
full of themselves and all the rest of it. So you only learned
this experience afterwards, I was. Once somebody told me this about a
particular individual. I said, I've never felt that I've done
anything wrong to the person but then I realized that this is
probably what it was.
But again, those challenges you're going to be dealing with everyday.
I'm sure it's the same thing with doctors that you have a certain
number of minutes to see so many different and you know, I've been
to doctors, and sometimes they just trying to finish you off
quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly. Yes, what else? What
else? What else type of thing. But I think a lot of this obviously
makes a big difference. Doctors.
While Muslim scholars may play a prominent role with Muslims, very
close role with a lot of Muslims, Muslim doctors, they obviously
play a greater role both in Muslims and a lot with non Muslims
because you're working in mainstream institutions.
That adds a whole different dimension. We've got massive
Islamophobia around us.
We've got a lot of this problem.
Little they do some of these patients know that their doctor
may be
Muslim
and they are putting themselves in your hands. Sometimes you may be a
surgeon, you may be cutting them up. Right? Which essentially a
Muslim cutting up somebody I mean, that sounds kind of gross to start
with. But that's an absolute possibility the person putting you
to sleep. What is it?
What is it called? A nice theologist?
Sorry.
Okay, that's what I'm used to. And here they call them
a nice surface. A nice artist. Now the other one sounds better. I
think it sounds a bit more exotic anyway.
So you're putting somebody to sleep?
That sounds like horrifying. I mean, you know, can you imagine a
rogue Muslim, not giving people ideas. But you've got a lot of
corruption out there. There's one guy who used to work in a sperm
bank,
some crazy anonymously.
And he was not he was a *. He had some other mental issues.
And he was sending his own sperm to various different, I think he
sent it to I don't know, the exact number. But scores of people only
later was discovered because of a DNA test, that he wasn't sending
the sperm from the sperm bank that he was spending his own sperm.
So you've got a lot of crazy stuff out there. Right? Now, Muslim
doctors, they have this real in close interaction with their
patients. The the main thing that I see about being in any vocation,
I mean, this doesn't relate just to doctors. It can relate to
engineers. But I think when it comes to doctors, you've got a
human interaction. An engineer is not going to be dealing with
humans as their subject, it's the doctor. So you have a very, very
noble job. And I think, in England, I think it's very
different America, in America, every Indian Pakistanis dream and
desire is that that their son or daughter becomes a doctor, or a
liar.
That's, that's what it is. We did Dr. Banana was called liar, banana
was like, Look, I can understand the doctor. But don't make Him a
liar. You know, become a lawyer if you want, right. But that's a very
typical thing. Because in America, the two main jobs that make you
huge amounts of money, you start off with 70 80,000. I think the
British doctors don't make anything compared to what you make
in America, a physician is, what we have to remember is that unlike
an engineer, or an architect, or any other vocation that we have, a
physician is first and foremost a servant of the people.
It's one of those jobs that I believe that you can easily make
an intention and get reward more than an engineer can. An engineer
has to really think very, very deeply as to how he can turn his
job into something Islamic, aside from the fact that, okay, I'm
doing this to earn money for my family, to feed them, that's a
very praiseworthy intention. But in terms of the job that he's
doing, it's very difficult, you know, unless you say, Okay, I'm
facilitating people's movements, or a bridge engineer or something
like this. But when it comes to a doctor, every job that you do,
every patient, you see, you could have that intention. So I think
the potential for Obama and for doctors is huge, because every
single patient, they see, they could be rewarded, both monetarily
and spiritually. That's if you have the correct intention, that
correct intention become then second nature. So it's not
something that you just think of on some days, but where you
actually the patient is coming in. Patient is a bit weird sometimes.
But the way you create suburbs and patients in you is by having in
the forefront of our mind that this is my vocation is foremost a
servant for the people, that I'm helping these people out, I can
make a change to these people's lives. And believe me, it's the
same thing. I get calls at weird times of the day, and all orlimar
do, and you just feel like, you know, saying, Don't you understand
the time that you're calling? And they will come up with some random
questions. But then you just have to realize that look, I'm getting
a reward because
as an artist, we give lectures, we can write books, the press now in
a lecture, or writing a book, what do you think the return rates are?
In terms of how many people will benefit from that and actually
practice what you what I give a Jumar by
how many people do you think I'm talking to that? I may be talking
to 1000 people but how many people will will what will be my return
on that? On a normal football normal bar?
What's the percentage? It's about five to 10%. So really, super by
on maybe 30%. Right? Maybe
I'd like a banana about hydro Ramadan or something like this,
you know, depending on some other factors.
However, there's one aspect of the islands life where you get nearly
100% return that is answering questions. When a person comes to
you with a specific question, query counseling issue, and you
respond to them, because there's a follow up, there's a need there,
and you're responding to that. That's a higher return. You guys
have that all day long, all day long. It just depends on what's my
approach to this is this a vocation for me is this just, I'm
stuck in being a doctor, you know, my parents forced me into it, or
whatever the case is, what's the story? So maybe that will help to
Insha Allah, just the kind of bad days that you have that you know,
to drive you along, in sha Allah. So it's a very sensitive task at
hand. Just to give you an example, my mother had Rahim Allah, she's
passed away now but she had cancer started off as breast cancer, then
when that will eventually to the lungs and so on. But she had
treatment, she was fine for about good 910 years and it came back
then she had a chemotherapy, then she had to have another session.
She mashallah she really pulled it through for a very, very, very
long time.
That Ramadan before she died around just before Hajj, that two
months before that was Ramadan, she finished seven Quran Xin
Ramadan, right. She's passed away. But what I'm trying to say is,
after Ramadan, it was only after Ramadan, when the second set of
chemo nearly over. And it didn't work. There wasn't much benefit to
it. And the doctors are insisting on telling her because I think
there's something that you have to tell the patient, you can't keep
the patient in the dark or something saying, Look, don't tell
her. Right. They had to tell her, and then she just went downhill.
So once you
once she knew that it wasn't working, I think finally she just
lost her drive, or whatever the case is. And then I guess, humans
have this ability to, which I don't know, I mean, I'm sure
there's a lot of studies on that, where you can fight something.
Right.
And
so eventually, she just started deteriorating, because I think she
eventually lost hope that okay, totally spread this, there's no
hope anymore. So I think Islamically speaking
not to, I'm not saying that we need to be deceptive. But we need
to give as much hope as possible. A lot of the time, from a
patient's perspective, you go to the doctor, because you've got
some weird pains or some weird feeling in the stomach or
whatever. And you have a fear that it could be ulcers, it could be
something worse than it is. You go to the doctor he checks out says
no, no, it's not an answer. It's not this. It's not that and how
much satisfaction and reassurances that give you huge amounts, it
makes you better. You know what, if you had stayed in that mode of
thinking, you've got a big problem, you will probably end up
getting some other brands because It's mind over matter. A lot of
these things do influence us.
Because there's an external to internal I'm sure you guys know
this much more than I do. But the study that I read about was that
there was a group of people who are studying facial expressions,
human facial expressions, you know, there's millions of them.
So they had an understanding that obviously, and how you're feeling
that's how your facial expressions will be. Now we know that right?
So they were systematically going through expressions of joy,
expressions of anger, expressions of sadness.
So on this particular day, it was the day to do angry and
angry and sad faces. So they were obviously trying to recreate these
faces. By the end of the day, they actually noticed that they were
actually feeling sad and frustrated. There was no reason to
feel sad or frustrated was no external factors to do that, but
they felt that way. So that's when they discovered that just as
internal feelings affect our external expression. Likewise,
sometimes our external expression also
has an effect on our internal feelings. And thus then you
understand the hadith of Rasulullah sallallahu sallam,
which is that it's a sadaqa that you meet your brother with a
smiling face, and talpa a haka be wedged in palliating. Which, you
know if there was even slight acrimony, or slight
suspicion in the heart, slight resentment in the heart from some
miscommunication of the past, you go to somebody with a smile,
colorless, that does such a big job. So giving, what does it what
is the smile essentially it's a reassurance. Look, it's a scent
Security, it's showing that I'm safe with you. Likewise, I think
doctors need to give as much reassurance as possible
to build up within your work ethic, while telling people what
they have, you know what they must do. But there needs to be a lot of
it makes a big difference is half the to be positive is half the
cure. Sometimes, words have a massive impact.
The better we I think when it comes to dealing with people, I
think the thing which matters is our luck, our character system.
According to people like human bizarrely, more naturally, upon me
and many others,
they've reduced this down to three faculties. Right? I'm sure you
must have heard of this. All of our character, our luck, our
behavior, our conduct, it reduced down to three things. One is
it's the moderation of three internal faculties that have
the word anger.
And again, anger is not the right word. But it's, it's good enough
in this context, desire. And number three is the intellectual
faculty. So when you look at each of these faculties, let's take the
intellect first.
When we say intellect, it's Ockel is a network of Allah, it's a gift
of Allah without Ockel, the Sharia would be very difficult to
understand, because alcohol is what processes the information,
and understands what is necessary for us. That's the intelligence.
So when it comes to alcohol, how much can we use our actual and
intelligence? How far does reason go? Clearly there is a
jurisdiction beyond which only revelation as as that's, that's
the Muslim belief anyway. So to use it to that level,
to try to go beyond that, and try to go into the realm of the unseen
and other aspects that eschatological realities and other
matters, it's not going to work. So that's the extreme in that
sense. But then there's also shortcoming for a lot of people, a
lot of Muslims just don't use the app. They just don't reason very
well, they follow trends, majority of people are that way. They're
followers. They're not leaders, they just whatever they find, they
just follow the normal trend. That's, that's what's happening.
So that's where you have what they call an Arabic froth and the
fried, which is basically
extreme,
extreme exaggeration on one side, or shortcoming on the other side.
So that needs to be moderation. Number two is the anger for
somebody to have his anger faculty and overuse it, it leads to
tyranny, and murder, killing, social cleansing, and everything
else, basically, it goes to the extreme in that regard. On the
other hand, if the anger faculty is not exercised sufficiently,
then the person has is a coward. So that shortcoming in that, in
that regard is cowardice. And thus, the person won't even stand
up to fulfill his own rights to stand up, to defend himself even
to defend his family, defend his religion, for that matter, or
anything was just laid back, carry on in my computer game I Pokeyman,
or whatever it is, I don't care what happens. That's basically
extremes to avoid the extremes on both sides and the desire when
it's very simple, I mean, going extreme that leads to
all of these exotic forms of sexual vices.
sexual deviancy is, you know, we don't need to highlight them,
they, you know, everything up to *, which is still haram,
you know, still considered to be a taboo in our society today. Right,
and, and so on and so forth. And a shortcoming.
And a shortcoming in that regard, is that a person doesn't even
fulfill the rights of their spouse.
So, these are the three internal faculties which make up the
character of human being, if there is equilibrium, and moderation in
these three, then the outputs how we react is going to be moderate.
And the closer that is to moderation the closer the profit
and loss is, the closer the person is to the prophetic equilibrium.
Because the promise of a lorrison was the most finely tuned
individual in this regard with the best character in the colada
Filipino the sublime character.
Now if you look at our Omar, the hola Juan was very close, but his
anger faculty was a bit high, as we know he was willing to always
whereas when you go to Abu Bakr Siddiq or the Allah Han, he was
more of on the merciful side. But both of them have much closer to
the prophetic equilibrium than many of us would be.
One is you have a knack.
From shyness, a person is just that introverts naturally shy,
there's no reward in that, yes, they won't get themselves into
trouble a lot of the time as extroverts would would, but at the
same time, there's no reward for that, because that's not high up
higher is religious modesty, where it's done for the sake of Allah,
not just the natural shyness, because natural shyness will
prevent you from doing certain things where you're supposed to
speak up for where the dean and the religion would tell you to
speak up. And to do something, natural shyness would actually be
a prevention. So natural shyness is not high up here is a very
special bashfulness done for the sake of the dean, right, which is,
as the Hadith autolab lawsuit says, is to protect the head and
everything that is attached to the head, the stomach and everything
to that, and to be concerned about the hereafter. So what we want to
do is we want to fit into a proper Muslim paradigm,
to try to fine tune our character, so that we can be contributors to
our society through our work. Because Allah has chosen each one
of us to be in a particular vocation as a scholar, an
engineer, an architect, a doctor, or a lawyer, whatever it whatever
it is, each one has its own things. But I think when it comes
to the doctor, it's a very, very hands on very close interaction
with non Muslims. Right, especially, you know, you can make
a massive change to their life. In that regard, I think we need to
obviously, go beyond our surgeries. And I'm sure I know,
everybody, every medical doctor out there is not going to do this.
But the few aspiring ones, or as many as there are to try to get to
a limit where they can actually contribute to the discourse. How
certain was a Jeremy Hunt, is that the one everybody's angry with?
Right?
To have a to get to the level where you can advise on these
aspects. I think that's what's important. Because currently,
we're always on the receiving end.
And that's because we don't try hard enough to get to the level.
As bad as everything may seem,
I think we still have huge opportunities, I still have a lot
of optimism. I just don't think we try enough. Everything is a
conspiracy theory. Everything is that they're out to get us they
won't let us prosper. They won't let us
progress. And I think yes, maybe in some cases, that is the case.
But it's not that across the board, there are still a lot of
good people out there. A lot of good people out there who want
fairness, they just want us to show them that that is the case
that that's what's happening. And when we show that, you will see
that they will make room for you. For example, a friend of mine who
works in a housing association, he was actually when he was
headhunted for that. But it because he knows the specific
software that housing associations use, and he can work with that.
And he's the only Muslim that works
in that organization.
And what they've done for him is that when he went for the
interview at the beginning, he said that I want I need to pray
five times a day. So at least two times a day, I'm going to need to
pray. So I'm going to need some place. So they took down the
information. And then they said, Okay, look, let's let us research
this, we'll get our human resources section to research all
of this and get back to you. The next time they said, look, we've
figured it all out. We've done our research. Next door is a there was
a motel next. Was it a Holiday Inn, I can't remember where it was
right? We were going to rent a room out there for the whole year
for you so that you can go and use it anytime you want. And he said
look, you don't need to do that. I just need like a small space. So
they found a storage place where they cleaned it up a bit and put a
little carpet in there and and he just told me just in Ramadan. He
said that before Ramadan, before I could even tell him Ramadan is
coming up. They sent me my new timetable. And it said, a number
of Ramadan. Ramadan Ramadan, and I'm only the Muslim. I'm the only
Muslim. But that's because he's able to contribute well,
too. You know, a lot of us unfortunately, we've got extremes
in this regard. This is where in the in the mainstream industry,
right, we've got two extremes. One is the extreme of those who tend
to who think they're very religious, but they slack in their
work. They'll go late, they won't be very productive, but they
weren't their rights. It's my right to pray and to take off this
time or to take off eat or two days for eat or whatever, you
know, whatever the case is, but they're not really producing
anything. They're not contributing.
On the other hand, we've got some huge contributors. But
unfortunately, they don't even tell anybody they're believers.
They've just become completely
parts and standardized, you know, completely parts and parts.
of the system. And they, they will basically
sacrifice the Islamic principles for that. What we need are people
who are contributors, the best at what they do, but who are also
proud of their faith, and know how to impart that to people, and be
respected for that. And I think you can only do that if there's a
will, there's a desire, if you're ambitious, if you've got a goal in
mind, and you want to learn from others, essentially our character,
we can only improve in our character, if we open up ourselves
to change. If we believe that we are perfect as we are, and I'm
happy with the status quo, then we will never progress, we will
justify all the wrongs, we will be arrogant, and we won't enhance
ourselves at all. But it doesn't matter how old we are, or what
state state stage of our life we're in or, or vocation. If we
keep ourselves open, to learn from others, and how we can do things
better, then Insha Allah, that's a possibility.
There's a number of areas. I mean, my time is up. There's a number of
areas of research that I just want to draw your attention to that
I've been thinking about. There are certain inherent diseases that
are primarily found in Asians, Indian Pakistanis, Bangladeshis,
and so on and so forth.
Now, of course, what's the cause for that? There could be many
different causes, right? One, one thing to look at is
we live in this climate, but we're still eating foods and spices,
imported from other climates.
How conducive is that? I know we're not going to give that up.
Right? But I'm saying how conducive is that? Does that
impact on our health? Because Allah clearly created Why is why
are certain things right in certain countries and not in
others or certain areas and not in others? Now I mean, mashallah, we
do live in England, which is like the crossroads of the world where
we get everything mangoes throughout the year, whether
they're, you know, sometimes Pakistani men or something, Indian
mangoes, sometimes South American mangoes, right? Or whatever the
case is, but this is something to think about the, the effect of our
diets on us. So some real studies need to go into these kinds of
things.
The, I think, another thing that's really helpful is not to be just
fixated on our allopathic allopathic system. I know, that's
what you primarily practice, I'm assuming. But in fact, many
doctors out there don't even know that they are practicing
allopathic medicine, because that's the only system that they
know and everything else like homeopathy, and I avoid I Vidic
and your nanny or Greek, Hellenistic, whatever. That's all.
Doesn't stand up to science is not, you know, provable, so on so
forth. But I think we should keep our minds open about these things,
and not be just so fixated on this.
Of course, you have to go within the legal framework that you have
to work in. But
allopathic medicine has obviously given huge amounts of benefit to
the world, you know. And while there are people who say you
should always do take natural medicine,
my thinking and again, this is just on a very preliminary level,
my thinking is that
that doesn't seem to be very plausible. Yeah, it's effective,
but I don't think you can rely just on naturopathic medicine.
Because we are consuming so many chemicals. We are consuming so
many preservatives, the food if we leave that natural, if somebody is
very organic, very natural, and he's avoiding all forms of
additives and all of these other artificial things, then maybe
naturopathic medicine would be perfect, right? But once you start
filling yourself with all of this junk that is out there, right
flavor enhancers and msgs and everything else, then you need
something a bit stronger. Right, which comes in the form of
allopathic medicine, right? To come in, what do you call it, sort
that out. But these are all things that need to be looked at. And
again, I'm speaking on a completely unprofessional level,
you know, with all of these things, these are just ideas.
Just like hello, hello.
Allah subhanaw taala accept all of us for the vocation that he's put
us all in. Make us the best as part of that vocation. And make us
contribute to a better world inshallah and humanity, circle
love it.