Rania Awaad – Islamic Roots of Modern Psychology – Al Jazeera Centre Stage
AI: Summary ©
The doctor discusses the complex issue of mental health, including its multiple facets and the need for guidance from a Christian faith. They stress the importance of seeking guidance from a Christian faith to avoid harming mental health. The doctor also discusses the nuances of mental health and how it is not a matter of science or theories, but rather a complex issue related to the human psyche. The doctor also discusses the importance of mental health treatment, including medication and therapy, and the need for a modern understanding of mental health. The doctor emphasizes the need for research on religious and spiritual competency in clinical care.AI: Transcript ©
What we have is a very narrow view
of treating mental illness. Mhmm. But a holistic
understanding
is one in which you bring in
spirituality.
You're bringing in environmental social issues. You're bringing
in understanding the biology, the genetics Mhmm. Altogether.
Taking center stage today is doctor Rania Hawad,
a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the
Stanford University School of Medicine
and founder of the Stanford Muslim Health and
Islamic Psychology Lab.
Welcome, doctor Anya. Thank you so much, Al.
It's really a great honor to meet you
today. But I want to start with,
personal concern.
A lot of women sent to me seeking
advice
on mental health.
And there's always a common feeling of shame
because many people around them,
tell them that the faithful does not get
depressed. Al mum bin Nayakta'ib.
And then I see the Islamic Lab. You
you found it at Stanford. I read about
the extensive research you did on Muslim mental
health. You studied Islamic studies before psychiatry,
so we need your verdict.
Does seeking mental health contradict with faith?
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I hear this
often too, this idea that the believer,
the woman, does not actually fall into any
sort of depression or iktiyyah, like, as you
mentioned. Because I feel like we've gone far
from our understanding of our of the tradition
of our prophet
where there was an entire year in his
life in the seerah called the Amal Husun
or the year of sadness, the year of
sorrow, the year of grief.
He had multiple losses that happened. And when
you think about that year, even the companions
around him were very concerned about how deep
that grief was.
And yet we know at the same time
that prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him, was khair khalqala, right,
the best of all creation.
So you have someone who
is so incredibly connected to Allah
to God. And at the same time,
that does not take away from feeling grief
or sorrow.
And every day that he would wake up,
we know that there's athkar, you know, kind
of remembrances of the Sabahim as of morning
and evening. And one of my favorite is
the one that he says in the mornings
where he says it starts off
with. Oh, Allah, I seek refuge in you
from worry and grief and acknowledging
that these are real human emotions even as
as as best of a person you are.
You're still going to experience these emotions because
Allah created these emotions.
So when I hear people say this, it's
almost like we've forgotten part of our tradition.
We've forgotten stories like the story of Sayid
Dayahu prophet
Jacob, who cried so extensively at the loss
of his son,
later his other son as well, into where
the Quran itself speaks about how his grief
caused him
to have blindness, or some people say kind
of a kinda like a cataract situation, haziness,
a vision.
Like, this concept of you could be a
prophet of God and still have deep deep,
and it doesn't take away from your
being a believer.
Mental health is very multifactorial.
Mhmm. It's could be biological,
genetic. It could be social or environmental. Mhmm.
It could be spiritual. It could be some
combination of any of these. So when we
go straight to the spiritual part and say,
if you have belief you won't get depressed,
you're ignoring biology,
genetics,
social environmental causes of mental illness. When you
talk about,
sorrow and grief and concern, they resonate with
the terms we use today in psychology and
mental health,
anxiety and depression.
And when we think about psychology or the
way,
psychiatry presents psychology, they present it as modern
science. But you found out that it's actually
not. Tell us more about it. But I
had been trained, as you mentioned, in the
Sharia Sciences previous to this. We read the
old text, the Torah. Right?
And I thought, well, let's read what they
have to say. Is there anything here? I
started out with medical textbooks from the 7th,
8th, 9th centuries onward. You don't have to
go very far because the physicians at that
time were writing from the head to the
toes. Mhmm. So you just get into a
few chapters in and you're like, oh, wow.
What is all of this? There's a whole
science to this. And then I discovered it
wasn't just medical textbooks.
Today's psychology is under schools of medicine. But
other other than the sciences,
psychology used to be something that was very
multidisciplinary
and especially in the Islamic understanding.
So you had writers who were contributing from
theology.
Oh. And you have writers contributing from philosophy
and writers contributing from spirituality
and others contributing from medical background. And this
is what makes alimun nef, or the science
of the self or the soul,
different
from the Muslim past and that they were
very interdisciplinary in their understanding of the human
psyche.
It's much more than just the cognitive brain
science. Today, we think of neuroscience,
and that's where psychiatry more mostly sits. But,
actually,
you think about it as something in which
there is all the different disciplines come in
to explain
the human psyche.
But maybe the misunderstanding
between,
Muslims and mental health is not really because
they've forgotten
their legacy, maybe because they simply don't know
it. One of the things they don't know
is that the first,
documented
mental health retreats
were recorded in hospitals in the Islamic world
called the Maristhan.
How did they look like? Who did they
treat? Yes. This is part of my such
an excitement to share this,
part of this research and figuring out, okay,
was it only theories that were being written
by the great physicians and scholars of the
Muslim past? Or do they take that theory
and put it into practical implementation? Mhmm. And
they did. And that's what you're referring to.
Shortened, we say, madistan.
Mhmm. The original word is is.
The is the ill person
and and is a location or an abode.
The Arabic is.
Right? The centers of healing.
And that's where we're writing the book at
the moment on how the centers of healing
in the Muslim world, the daughter Shefa's,
they had a first documented
awards or sections for mental illness, the treatment
of mental illness. The psychiatric sections next to
all of the other sections. So whether it's
surgery, internal medicine, ear, nose, and throat, obstetrics,
and so on and so forth. And that
was an amazing discovery to realize that there
wasn't discrimination between mental health and physical health
in their hospitals.
And the root of this, in that this
there was a very divine inspiration to this.
And this is where the scholars that write
about this, they quote specific hadith of the
prophet,
and they talk about how when they came
to ask some companions came to ask him,
shall we seek out treatment if we're ill?
And he responded and said,
Like, seek out treatments for your illnesses.
So Allah does not send down an illness
or does not create an illness unless he
also has created
its cure. And so what's beautiful about this
is that they saw different illnesses in front
of them, and they felt inspired
to figure out how to treat them and
build institutions of healing for them, not discriminating
between mental health and physical health. We've written
a couple of papers recently. One is in
the Harvard Review of Psychiatry
where we talk about Adarazi and how he
instituted our to our understanding,
the first instance of psychiatric
aftercare Wow. Which means after a patient is
discharged
from the hospital, mental health hospital,
he makes sure that they had 3
at that point in time. And he says
2 of which were really for the person
to be able to, with dignity, come back
into their society, into the community they are
in without people asking them, where were you
and how come?
And they were able to integrate fully. And
the third of the folding autos
was to start their own business. A lot
of,
researchers in psychology
also
coined
OCD as
a
disorder of our modern times, resulting from our
modern times To discover that it was there
since 9th century,
did it really,
correlate with OCD as we know it today?
And did they treat it the the same
way we do today? One of the people
that I came across in my readings,
as I was reading all the olden texts
was somebody by the name of Abu Zayd
al Balhri. He's from the 9th century.
And as he was writing, he has a
small book. It's a really a treatise, really,
that he calls.
So the sustenance of the body and soul
is how you would translate that today.
And as I was reading through, he writes
all of these physical illnesses. And then the
second half of the book, he says, and
now I'm going to dedicate this to mental
illnesses because the physicians of my era are
not paying enough attention to this. Mhmm. But
it's just as important.
And then he has these chapters 1 by
1, and I came across the one that
really surprised me. All of it was beautiful.
But the one that really surprised me was,
you know, where he talks about.
Mhmm. Basically, the which everybody knows either And
that's the Arabic translation
of, OCD,
Like, you know, there's there's there's kind of
a everybody has a little bit of it.
But what he says is that's normative.
Mhmm. But for some people, they're going to
have a higher level of it. This is
where it's pathological. It requires treatment.
And then he outlines literally what exactly the
classification of this illness is, how you treat
it. And in the treatments, I was blown
away. Mhmm. Because he talks about exactly what
you find in today's understanding of OCD treatment.
He says there's medication that needs to be
taken. Mhmm. There's therapy, talk therapy that needs
to happen, and that really surprised me. I
thought they're talking about talk therapy. And then
he talks not just about a specific form
of talk therapy, which is exposure therapy, which
is what we use today for obsessive compulsive
disorder. And also he says, you'll also have
to rely on God. So a spiritual component.
Mhmm.
To me, this kind of this trio, you
know, this kind of 3 pronged approach of
treating mental illness, particularly OCD,
was so fascinating because in all of our
classes on psychology,
they do call it a modern illness. Mhmm.
So even from a scientific point of view,
we know that this constellation of symptoms existed
in for humans
much longer than what history tells us. Also,
we change the narrative. It's no longer this
very Eurocentric
view of psychology where everything is discovered in
Europe, and that's where psychology starts. It's actually
something so many civilizations have talked about,
and the Muslims in particular
really contributed heavily to. We talked about bringing,
mental health to Muslim communities.
What about bringing
faith and Islam to clinical psychology?
Why did you find the need to found
the Islamic Lab?
Yeah. The Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology
Lab was really a project after some of
these early publications.
It became clear to me that we didn't
have enough research on
Muslims specifically, particularly those in the diaspora, those
who are living outside of the Muslim majority
countries,
but even within it too. Mhmm. And
a part of the work was really to
figure out how do we best treat this
community
because so many people had a stigma related
to mental health. There was almost a sense
of this is very western. It doesn't belong
to us.
I'm not going to find any use in
it. What's the point of talking all of
my dirty laundry to somebody who is a
foreign who's foreign to me and my family?
Or or is it kind of there's a
shame in kind of talking about what's within
the family outside of the family?
And what was interesting to me is a
lot of what I was finding historically actually
documented
completely differently.
That Muslims are very much at the forefront
of this, including things like talk therapy. Mhmm.
And we're very much advocates of making sure
that you get the help you need when
you need it. Well, I think maybe the
main question that comes to my mind is
when did it stop the whole treating of
mental health and taking care of our,
mental health, when did it stop? When did
we have this break that causes the stigma
today?
The stigma has always been around. It's probably
as old as the beginning of man, honestly.
But I do think that,
you find a real difference happening when you
see that there were a lot of colonized
ideas and powers coming into Mhmm. Muslim majority
lands. The reason for that is the view
on mental illness
parallel to it, the understandings of mental illness
in Europe were very much either spiritual, like
this was some supernatural
possession or reason. So you send them to
the people of religion to deal with them.
Mhmm. Or they're witches, and they're burned at
the stake as a witch. And so you
really don't have a medicalized understanding
of the treatment of this,
of any mental illnesses.
Even though at the same periods of time,
you're finding in the Muslim lands these hospitals
that are literally treating mental illness from a
medical point of view.
And we're talking about centuries worth of a
difference. Where does the change happen when you
start having colonial powers come in and say
replacing
a lot of the indigenous forms of healing
and even education, replacing languages,
replacing
the medical textbooks,
replacing the concepts,
is very much today. Even if the countries
aren't colonized, you find the minds are still.
And I think this is where there is
needing a revival movement to happen To understand
that and and psychology is heading in this
direction today. Mhmm. That what we have is
a very narrow view of treating mental illness.
Mhmm. But a holistic understanding
is one in which you bring in
spirituality.
You're bringing in environmental social issues. You're bringing
in understanding the biology, the genetics Mhmm. Altogether.
Beyond mental health, where do you think we
need now,
a role of,
Islam and faith and maybe Muslim scholars in
medicine,
in medical disciplines.
I I really feel that that if anybody
should be at the forefront of this discussion,
it should be the Muslims. Mhmm.
History proves it. All of our heritage proves
this. But, also, there is this very kind
of,
divine basis to our understanding. The Maqas of
the Sharia, basically, the foundational principles of the
deen of the religion itself, essentially say you
have to have preservation of the intellect. Mhmm.
Right? That's one of the. It's one of
the foundational principles. And so if this is
at all jeopardized,
then, really, it should be us at the
forefront of making sure that this is happening,
and we were at that point.
The revival movement would say, let's make sure
that this is happening today, not distancing ourself
at all, actually bridging
modern medicine, modern science, all the advances that
have happened, but in a holistic view.
Because the concept of kind of an asylum,
of locking somebody up who has mental illness
and not giving them the kind of care
they need to really kind of the root
of the problem and solve it, or just
throwing pills at them isn't going to actually
solve the issue here. But but there's also
a need for Islam to be part of
the the conversation about medical advances in terms
of palliative care, in terms of bioethics as
well. Do you feel there's a lack of
research or,
involvement of faith in medical research
in general or Islam in particular? In general.
I would say it's definitely in general.
I think Islam and Muslims have a lot
to contribute to this.
Mhmm. There are a number of researchers who
are working today that I'm I'm very happy
to be part of this group of researchers
who are working on what we call
religious and spiritual
competencies in clinical care.
So treating the, basically, training the physicians and
all of the therapists who are gonna come
through into this field to make sure that
they're not ignoring this area of spirituality, which
could be very, very useful
to somebody who is god centered.
Mhmm. Like, if your worldview is a god
centered worldview, and the coping mechanisms you use
have a religious basis to them. If you
cut this out completely and make it secular,
it's not going to be feeling very connected,
which is why you have so many Muslims
saying, I don't know about this therapy thing.
It feels very
western. I don't know if it's western as
much as it's actually secular Mhmm. Is really
what the issue is. And when you bring
spirituality into it, suddenly you find people feeling,
yeah, this feels right. This feels like I'm
actually benefiting.
Mhmm. And that's where there's a group of
researchers, not just Muslim. I have Christian colleagues,
Jewish colleagues, Hindu and Buddhist colleagues who are
actually trying to bring spirituality into the discussion
on psychology.
Thank you very much, doctor Rania. It was
really a great pleasure to be talking to
you today. Wonderful to talk to you, Zato.
I appreciate this conversation.
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