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Presented
at a Seminar on Islamization of the Medical Curriculum and Practice held at the
International Islamic University Kuantan Malaysia 26-27th August 2013 by
Professor Omar Hasan K Kasule MB ChB (MUK), MPH (Harvard), DrPH (Harvard) EM omarkasule@yahoo.com, WEB: www.omarkasule.blogspot.com
The term shari’at
relating to hospitals should be used in its original wider sense of a general
guide and way, shir’atan wa minhaajan, for all Muslim activities and not
the limited sense today that confines it to ‘ibadat and some mu’amalaat.
What distinguishes a Muslim hospital is not the architecture or the types of
medical procedures but the Islamic paradigms, values, ethics, and culture of
the health professionals, other workers, and the patients. All existing and
useful knowledge and technology used in the hospital can be used but within the
Islamic moral and ethical context, a process called Islamization. The basic
guiding paradigms to be considered in the planning of the hospital are (a)
integration (deriving from tauhid), (b) balance (tawazun), (c)
quality work (ihsan and itqan), and justice (‘adl). The hospital
should be planned around fulfilling the 5 main purposes of the shari’at
(maqasid al shari’at) that are preservation, protection, and promotion
of diin (hifdh al ddiin), life (hifdh al nafs), progeny (hifdh
al nasl), human intellect (hifdh al ‘aql), and resources (hifdh
al maal). The hospital operational procedures should be planned according
to the principles of fiqh (qawa’id al fiqh) that have yet to be
developed in detail for hospitals but were developed for commercial
transactions in the Ottoman legal gazette called Majallat al Ahkaam al Adliyyat.
The commercial codes of the majallat require further development to be
applicable to the business operations of a modern hospital. To these must be
added new codes on standard operating procedures and practice guidelines that should
be based on the best available empirical experience within an Islamic ethical
and legal context. Implementation of a shari’at compliant hospital will
fail if initiated in a revolutionary way. The process should be evolutionary
starting with what exists, making changes as we go along, and learning from
experiences both positive and negative.
The most strategic move in the whole process is the Islamic training of
the professionals and workers in the hospital. A shari’at compliant
hospital faces many challenges the most significant being financial survival.
Since the idea of such a hospital is new to many people, skepticism will keep
patient numbers and hence revenue low at the start but with passage of time
this problem can be overcome.