Examining the 'Continuous Interaction' Between Science and Religion

October 26, 2016
Ahmed Ragab
Professor Ahmed Ragab is the director of the Science, Religion and Culture program at HDS. / Photo: Justin Knight

At the beginning of the fall 2016 semester, Dean David Hempton sent an email letting the HDS community know that Ahmed Ragab had been promoted to the Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion.

To those who know him, this announcement came with pleasure and no surprise. With an MD from Cairo University and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from L’École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, Ragab has both the commanding demeanor of a physician and the radiance of a brilliant scholar.

His latest book is The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity. HDS communications met him in his office at the Center for the Study of World Religions to discuss the book, as well as the Science, Religion, and Culture program, which he directs, and the Ways of Knowing conference, which was held on the HDS campus October 27-29.

HDS: What were some of the most surprising or interesting things you discovered while researching this book?

Ragab: I think some of the more exciting things that I found were related to the role of the hospital in the environment in which it existed, and also to the way that physicians thought and worked inside these hospitals. The previous scholarship is focused almost entirely on the hospitals as simply medical institutions, and particularly how Islamic hospitals were seen as modern-like institutions in the sense that they look more secular than, say, Byzantine institutions or Western European Latin institutions. What I found to be more accurate than such a description is to think about these hospitals within the landscape of charity that they existed in, in that they were primarily for the people who were working on them, and also for the patients. They were able to function so well in the Islamic context precisely because of the existence of other charitable institutions around them. They were one part of a larger network of charity that included mosques, public kitchens, charitable hotels, and so many other things that allow these hospitals to focus on working with patients.

As I mentioned in the book, this focus on patients was not a function of exclusion. There's absolutely no evidence of somebody being turned away at the hospital because they were hungry or tired, as opposed to sick. But since there were other places for you to go if you're hungry or tired, very few people would show up at the hospital doors unless they were actually sick.

Another thing that is related to the way physicians thought and worked in the hospitals—and this is the part in the book where I discuss medical thinking and medical practice—is that these physicians were very much aware of the limited time that they have to spend with the patients, and that they moved more and more towards a focus on practice and a focus on examination as the main tool of practice, as opposed to reliance on medical theory. They encountered some of the challenges that other people continue to face in hospitals today.


HDS: What knowledge about medieval Islamic hospitals would help medical practitioners today?

Ragab: I think, in general, this book offers a way of thinking about the role of hospitals in society, in that hospitals are actually much bigger than their medical nature, and they need to be understood as such. They are not simply medical institutions. Today, they are not really run by physicians or run by medical thinking. They are run and administered in so many different ways, using different theories and different traditions of bureaucracy, administration, and finance. All of these things are part and parcel of hospital making.

So, if we want to think about our hospitals today as part of our healthcare system in general, we need to be aware of all these different dimensions of hospitals. To make a hospital better is not only through bringing in better physicians, for instance, or through better facilities or better equipment and so on, but it requires a further look at the people who go to these hospitals and why they go to the hospital.

The other thing that we see at that time is that people actually do not want to be at hospitals. This is a very important thing. People go to hospitals simply because they have to. We need to think of our hospitals as almost factories of medical science. We need to go there because of the big machinery that cannot be taken outside, and that anyone else who can afford to actually receive care outside the hospital would definitely opt to do so. It is not a new thing to think that a proper and more effective medical system is a medical system that allows people not to go to the hospital, rather than a medical system that deals with people in the hospital.

We need to try to get care to people before they get to the hospital, before we have to deal with large numbers of patients inside, and in an environment where nobody wants to be there. Physicians don't want to practice in these hospitals because they never have time. Patients don't want to be there because they want to be with their families. It is a place that needs to be a last resort and not the focus of our medical initiatives. Many people have already talked about how this is such a drain on economic resources. It's just simply an undesirable outcome at all possible levels.

HDS: What is the Islamic philosophy about medicine and healing?

Ragab: In general, people did not perceive medicine as a way of trying to delay death or trying to defy death. Often in modern scholarship people wonder about this idea, this connection between seeking care or cure in case of sickness, and at the same time the belief in a predestination—that life and death have been determined already for every single person even before one's birth. In this case, medicine's role is about life, not about death. It is not intending to protect people from death. It doesn't intend to prolong people's lives, but it intends to make them live a good life. And therefore, there is a cure for every sickness. Everyone has to seek this cure, as part of their religious obligation.

And yet, at the same time, they understand and accept that disease is just part and parcel of life. And therefore, there is a different calculation to it, the same way that, say, you get hit by a financial loss. You are required to seek ways to avoid this financial loss, but if you get hit by financial loss, eventually you are required not to lose faith in God and to understand that you could make good at the end of it, and that God would reward you for your patience and your belief.

In the same way, sickness is just part and parcel of life. It happens. You need to protect yourself against sickness by leading a healthy life, and if you get sick, you need to seek treatment. But ultimately, if the disease isn't curable or if you're unable to find the cure for it, for whatever reason, you need still to accept God's will and have patience.

It might look contradictory for our contemporary society, which focuses on a black and white kind of division of the world, but I don't think it looks strange for people of religion today. The majority of religious people in our world today would seek care for their problems, and at the same time believe that these problems are part of their destiny and part of what happens to them, and they still need to maintain belief in God and to maintain patience.

In Islam in general, there is no valorization of self-inflicted suffering in any way. It is more about people needing to lead good lives, leading a healthy life, and raising their children properly. You have this kind of obligation to try to make your life better. But, at the same time, you understand that you are only obliged to do what's possible for you.

There are a lot of traditions about the prophet seeking cures himself, and people use this as an indication of this being the proper behavior, that that people need to seek cures, since the prophet himself sought cures when he was sick.

HDS: Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about the Science, Religion, and Culture program. A lot of people not in the field still think of science and religion as mutually exclusive, but you're bringing them together with this program. Through discussions, workshops, seminars, and research, you aim to go beyond this idea of conflict or reconciliation. What has the project achieved so far, specifically in impacting change for a better world, on the practical level?

Ragab: You precisely identified what we want to do. We actually look at people and how they are living and the problems that people are suffering from. The fact of the matter is ordinary people are not thinking of science and religion as two separate things, but they live with science and religion continuously. People deal with science and technology in their daily lives, with their cars and phones and hospitals and whatever they do, and they deal with religion—whether they are personally religious or not—because religion is part of the various societies that we live in. We start from this point, which is, on the ground, science and religion interact continuously, and we want to take that and ask, Okay, how do they interact? What is happening? What are the problems? How do we use this interaction to solve serious problems that people are facing?

We have junior fellowships for master’s students and doctoral fellowships for doctoral students, and this is the major part of where a lot of the research in the program is taking place. People are working on a number of issues. For instance, last year, there were fellows working on relief and aid in times of crisis, and how can we manage between discourses of public health and questions related to religion and religious institutions.

This year, there is a fellow who is working on migration across the Mediterranean and problems that happen with African migration, and also, looking at questions of religion, ritual, burials, and issues related to religion there. Others are working on questions of the environment, particularly on environmental views of Evangelical Christians in the United States. Others are working on issues related to creationism and the development of creationism within the evangelical community here in the United States, and where this started, and the history of it. This kind of examination allows us to work with these questions better.

In addition to the fellows and the work that they do individually, we do other collective work that the entire program is involved in. We did a project on sex and gender-based violence that worked with parishes and different congregations around the Boston area, to think about how they are talking about sex and gender-based violence and how they are understanding gender issues. We did a big qualitative study that we released last year, and the next step is to take it into developing intervention strategies.

At the end of the year, we're going to launch a new platform for outreach and working with the communities. The point of this platform is that we will work with religious communities and congregations, particularly in areas where there are the minorities or underprivileged communities, because there isn't enough support from state or federal authorities, or because sometimes there is mistrust between the communities and the government. We work with these communities on a number of issues to develop them as sites for local development. And these will include, for instance, medicine and medical education and decision-making resources, to allow them to advise their congregants about medical issues and about medical questions. This becomes particularly important in non English-speaking populations.

There's another issue about building healthy environments and how these parishes or churches or temples or mosques can use their actual area where they are to create natural environments that will improve the health outcomes of the people living there. This is important particularly in areas where green spaces are not available and in the areas that research describes as “food deserts,” where basically you only have fast food and unhealthy food and small supermarkets. This will be a big platform that we will launch at the end of this year, and we will hope to work with donors through grants and also through corporate partnerships and sponsorships to work on these very specific issues in different places. We'll start obviously in the Boston area, but then move beyond that. We're also working on a number of research projects that will have an impact in the long run.

At the end of the day, we are located in a school that is part of a large research university, and so our strength is in our knowledge production. And so even in these outreach projects that we have, it is not a one-directional thing. We're not only bringing recipes to people to use, we're doing research with them to develop tools that will be applicable elsewhere. Working with the current policy around the university for open access, we hope to make a lot of these papers available to everybody, so that this could be picked up by many other communities around the world.

HDS: On top of everything else, you also have the Ways of Knowing conference October 27-29. This is a huge conference, the largest in the field, with over 120 presenters and 60 grad programs worldwide. What are you aiming to discuss?

Ragab: This year, the theme of the conference is the question of time. What does time mean? How do we deal with it in scholarship? How do we deal with it in the world around us? This is obviously an opportune moment to think about time, when the Divinity School is celebrating its 200th anniversary. That's the central aspect that a lot of the papers in the conference will be talking about.

We have other modules. One of them is talking about material culture, for instance, and the material culture that is attached to religion—religious artifacts and how we can understand and analyze them. There is another one that is talking about political issues, current political issues and their connection to religion.

Every year, this a great time for HDS. We have all these people coming from all over the world, presenting really wonderful work, and who are also eager to communicate and talk with students here. And it is always—I say this in all my classes and to all my students—it is very rare to be at a big conference, and it always will cost you a lot of money to travel, but here's a conference that actually comes to your doorstep. So I think it's a great opportunity.

—by Randy Rosenthal