The very first hospitals in human history
that incorporated mental health
or psychiatric institutions were within
the hospitals of the Muslims.
When I first discovered Islamic psychology.
I was looking through the books of the early
great scholars who had written about psychology in search
for what it is, that they understood about mental illness.
I was looking through the books
of physicians, early Muslim physicians, to see
what did they say.
And I came across a book from the ninth century
by Abu Zayd Al-Balkhi called “Masalih Al-Abdan wal Anfus”.
Today, part of that book is translated,
the second half under the title “Sustenance of the Soul”.
Al-Balkhi is from the ninth century,
and he took great lengths to write about
physical medical illnesses
and then also mental illnesses
in the second half of his book.
And as I was reading this book,
I looked at the different chapters,
and one of the chapters really caught my attention.
Today
as a trained psychiatrist,
as I was reading this,
I thought to myself,
this looked like obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD.
Down the hall for me
when I was training at Stanford
University was one of the main
important people in the field of OCD.
Somebody who had written
the main textbooks on this very topic,
and so I went down the hall, knocked on his door and said,
“I think I found something here about OCD
from much, much earlier than we study in
our field of psychology”.
In the field of psychology,
the illness called OCD
is often written about as a modern disorder,
something that was not discovered until the 19th century.
Or its very early case description,
but not fully fleshed out,
was written about in the 16th century.
But here I was reading
something in the 9th century
that looked very much like OCD.
And when I said this to my professor,
he said, “No, no, no, it can't be.
We've written everything there is to write about OCD”.
And I said to him, “But can you read an Arabic?”
He said, “No.
Can you?” And I said, “Yes”.
And he said, “Well, then go translate it and come back”.
And I did.
I took up the challenge,
translated that section of his book.
And something that was so interesting
is as I was writing the different classification
and diagnosis of that particular illness, it reminded me
so much of the way it was written about in the DSM,
which is the manual that psychiatrists or psychologists
diagnose from.
And I did a comparison between the DSM 5
and between Al-Balkhi’s criteria for obsessions.
And side by side,
you could see he got every single point correct.
I took this back to our professor and he was ecstatic.
So happy.
Not for the Muslim excitement of, wow,
an early Muslim scholar figured this out.
In his case,
for the scientific advancement
of understanding
the trans-historical benefit of knowing
that this constellation of symptoms existed back
much, much earlier than we expected.
And he actually advised to publish this.
And Alhamdulillah, the paper has now been published.
You can find it in the Journal of Affective Disorders
in which we talk about
how Balkhi is likely one of the first in history
to understand, classify, diagnose and treat
obsessive compulsive disorder.
And similar papers like this
in the Journal of Affective Disorders
and Journal of Anxiety Disorders and the like,
in which we were able to show
how some of the early Muslim scholars
were really at the forefront of the mental health field
and really understood
this and worked towards its treatment and its benefit.
So we Muslims should also be proud of this legacy
and understand our heritage
and be able to rewrite the narrative correctly
in making sure that Muslims are part
and parcel of the history of psychology
and its benefit going forward.
The scholars of our Islamic tradition
have spent a great deal of time
trying to understand the human psyche,
to really understand what it is that makes the human tick.
And to do that,
it was a very interdisciplinary understanding.
Historically, this field was called علم النفس
the study of the Soul.
And the reason it was really targeted in this way is
you'll see that it's no different
than the word psychology that we use today.
In the Greek roots of the word psychology.
The psykhē is also the soul, the breath or the spirit.
And logia is the study of.
So you see the study of the soul or in Arabic, علم النفس
is the same word as psychology historically.
The reason this is important
is because the early Muslim scholars derived that interest
in understanding
how the human psyche
worked directly from the Quran and the Sunnah.
What did they derive this from?
If you look at the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ that says
لِكُل داءٍ دَواء
that for every illness Allah has sent to Earth,
he's also sent a cure or a treatment.
This was an impetus for the early Muslim scholars
to search and understand
whatever illness they saw in front of them in society.
And they did not discriminate
or make a distinction between physical illnesses
and mental illnesses.
Why is that important?
Modern psychology
today is often
limited to cognitive and behavioural sciences,
to the exclusion of the spiritual, and definitely
they're interested in that empirical,
just like the early Muslim scholars,
but they are not invested in anything that is scriptural,
something that is sent from Allah (swt)
like we as Muslims
or any people of faith may take from Scripture.
For that reason, modern psychology today often is called
that its “lost its soul”
because where once it had,
it was interested in studying the soul.
In fact, the origins of the word
literally mean the “study of the soul”.
It lost this in modern Western psychology, mostly
because people would say it
can't be reproduced or empirically studied in labs,
or you can't touch it or look at it under an MRI machine.
However, we would agree that there are illnesses
that are very much important to study
and to find treatment for, such as depression and anxiety
and trauma and the like, but also diseases of the heart
envy, greed, avarice, pride.
All of these two need to be dealt with as well.
The concept of علم النفس
that interdisciplinary understanding
that the Muslim scientists created
took into account all of these.
It took into account the biological genetic,
it took into account the social environmental.
It took into account the rational and the empirical
and the scriptural spiritual.
When you look at this very holistic
understanding of the human being,
you also see that what the early Muslim scholars created
was a holistic treatment system
for when a human is not doing well.
When we start to really have mental turbulence,
then we must treat it holistically
and not just from one direction.
Why is this important also.
Because when you look at the theory
that the Islamic scholars created in terms of علم النفس,
you also see it didn't just stop at theory,
it went into practice.
Theory to practice is very important.
For me, one of the trademarks,
one of the things that are very clear
that our early Muslim scholars
took that theory,
that very interdisciplinary
understanding of the human psyche
and put it into practice, were their healing institutions.
The healing institutions in Arabic دار
الشِفاء, literally the house or place of healing.
Or using the Persian origin of the word “Bimar”
or illness, “Stan” meaning location the “Bimaristan”
then became known as the healing Centres or the hospitals
that the early Muslims created.
From as far back
as the time of the Prophet
ﷺ who ordered that the first Bimaristan,
which was a mobile unit,
move along with wherever the expeditions were happening,
where Muslims were traveling
through different lands
so that the ill can be taken care of.
Then in early Muslim history,
you find that
the first of the Bimaristans that are standing happened
took place as early as the eighth century.
And by the ninth century
you absolutely have these very massive
healing institutions that had in them sections,
just like they were able
to treat internal medicine
and your organs
and anything lungs and heart and GI tract related.
You also had sections related
to healing of the eye diseases,
healing of traumatology
or anything related to broken bones,
and a section on psychiatry, mental health.
To our knowledge
and our research that we do at my lab, the Stanford Muslim
and Health and Islamic
Psychology Lab,
we worked on actually researching this very topic
and to our knowledge,
the very first hospitals in human history
that incorporated mental health
or psychiatric institutions were within
the hospitals of the Muslims.
Why? Why was that?
Because you find that holistic understanding
of mental well-being,
just like
the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ says لِكُل داءٍ
دَواء for every illness there is a treatment.
It did not discriminate between physical illnesses
or mental illnesses, all of which were treated
and all of which had their sections
within that healing institution.
The Daar Al-Shifaa or the Bimaristan today.
The shortened Latinized word for that is Maristan.
And Maristan is very important
because wherever you go in the Muslim world,
just like you see the spread of
wherever Islam went, you find Masjid or places of worship,
you find Madrassas or places of teaching,
especially Islamic knowledge.
You'll also find Maristans from one end of the Muslim
empire all the way to the other end.
It is a trademark of our Islamic legacy in history.
We as modern Muslims today, when we ask, “Well
then what happened?”
If we had all of this understanding of psychology
and we had actual implementation of that.
So that theory into practice.
And you had institutions of healing within it,
you had treatment centers and actual treatments,
you had the talk therapies.
Yes, talk therapies and Muslims are some of the first
to utilize that for healing mental illnesses.
You also had medications
and the compounding of medications.
One of the institutions part of this
Maristan is the Sharabkhan,
which was basically the area in which you make,
create, medications for illnesses, physical and mental.
And you had sections within this Maristan as well
that were dedicated to spiritual well-being.
It was holistic in its understanding.
So you had the talk therapies
that had in it cognitive and behavioral changes.
You also had the spiritual
and religious therapies as well.
You also had in it
the use of all of your senses to be treated.
So every one of these Maristans,
one of their trademarks
are fountains,
beautiful fountains in which the sound of water
using sound therapy,
the sound of water itself was healing.
They were put in places in which
there was a lot of greenery
and a lot of beauty
so that the eyes could also heal the turbulent soul.
You also had in this other forms of sound therapy,
such as the use of the Maqaam or the tones.
Today, people might call this music therapy
or sound therapy.
And what they did with this is they would help raise or
elevate a person who was feeling depressed
and calm, a person down, who was feeling anxious.
All of this was written about by the greats.
Al-farabi, for example, wrote
great work related to the tones and their use in
treating mental illness and customizing that per patient.
You have a wonderful writings
about Abu from Abu Zayd al-Balkhi in the ninth century,
who put into great use the concept of the talk therapies,
where he says if a person had an obsessive illness,
which today
we might call OCD, and some of the papers
I've directly written on Balkhi talk about this
where he says,
use a form of therapy that today we would call exposure
therapy a gradual, little by little,
a person's obsessions would come down.
Or phobias
where a person's fears
would also be able to be diminished.
And then the use of spiritual remedies,
where he reminds us
and many of these scholars
that have written on the psyche remind us that if
Allah (swt) sent us an illness, he also sent a cure
and reminding us to seek out help
because of the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ.
that says تتَدَاوَوْا عِبَادَ اللَّهِ,
Seek out treatments O servants of Allah.
This understanding
is what allowed such greatness to happen.
And where we then lost.
This is also a loss of understanding our heritage,
our legacy.
Unfortunately, many, many factors contributed
to the loss of the Maristans,
and this knowledge in general.
Part of it had to do with colonization.
Part of it had to do with political instabilities.
Part of
it had to do with us as Muslims,
having the kind of mindset
that the secularized concepts are better than the
religiously informed.
And unfortunately, part of that is also on us.
The onus is on us
not knowing our own legacy,
our own heritage, our own history, and so on.
Insha’Allah
my hope
with all of this is
that we get to revive our legacy,
that we reclaim that heritage,
and that we rewrite the narrative
that has mostly written Muslims
out of the history of psychology
when we have done so much actually,
and we're really at the forefront of it.
But that's on us to rewrite the narrative Insha’Allah.