For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing

04 July 2007

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that radical Islam is less the product of extreme deprivation than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes and professionals

There is no doubt about the special role played by radicalised professionals — mainly doctors and engineers — in the rise of Islamic extremism. This first came to the attention of the world with the infiltration of Egyptian medical and related professional associations by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), culminating in the 1990s. Doubtless the most infamous representative of this trend was the Egyptian second-in-command of al-Qa’eda, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri — a physician from a family of doctors and pharmacists. But the MB also has immense influence among Palestinians through its offshoot, Hamas, as well as in Jordan and even in Iraq, where its front, the Iraq Islamic party, serves in the Baghdad government.

Why do doctors in Muslim countries sacrifice their long years of rigorous education in the ethics of ‘doing no harm’ and embrace such brutalising concepts as ‘death to unbelievers’? To Western medical and scientific personnel, who are taught to guard human life and to base their researches and healing on reason, the violence and contempt for life exhibited by al-Zawahiri and his colleagues in al-Qa’eda are both frightening and puzzling. How, it is asked, can a person trained to heal, according to a scientific discipline, behave with such ruthless contempt for life?

Our study, focusing on Arab and Pakistani doctors (the latter both at home and abroad) revealed that throughout much of the Islamic world, medicine and religion are bound together in a manner that has largely disappeared in the West. For Western doctors, medicine may draw on religious ethics; but for Muslim doctors, it draws on religious ethics and on the Islamic view of the universe. Furthermore, many Muslims associate healing with their religious leaders, and in the more traditional Islamic countries the imam is typically the first (and often the last) person consulted by the ill, and prayer or faith-healing prescriptions are the only therapies.

Muslim Brotherhood literature such as the work of Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) propagates the view that Islam and science are inextricable from one another, and that a fundamentalist view of religion will lead to a revival of Muslim science, such as existed in the Islamic golden age, more than half a millennium ago. For this reason the MB now targets professionals.