Holistic Healing: Islam’s Legacy of Mental Health
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Therapy a Millennia Before Modern Psychology | Holistic Healing Series
What is the secret that allowed Muslims to flourish into the Golden Ages as Europe sank into the Dark Ages? While people throughout the West were thought to be possessed by demons when dealing with depression, Muslims turned to Islamic teachings. Dr. Rania Awaad elaborates on the different scholars who initiated treatments that are now known as “therapy”!
This series was brought to you in collaboration with the Stanford Muslim Mental Health Lab.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. In the last video, we shared how the Muslims were pioneers in the field of mental health, how they classified, diagnosed, treated mental health conditions, but they also were the first to create incredible psychiatric hospitals and healing institutions. But did you know that they were also likely the very first in history to develop talk therapy and music therapy? And if that isn't amazing enough, it's important to remember when in history all of this was taking place. As far back as the 7th century, right after the advent of Islam that kick-started an incredible golden age for the Muslims. But at this exact same point in history, Europe was in its dark ages, where people who were suffering from mental illness at best were sent out of sight and out of mind to monasteries to be treated by priests because it was thought that what they were experiencing was possession by demons. And at worse, they were burned at the stake as witches. So how is it that in the Muslim lands, in their golden age, while Europe was in its dark ages, how is that? What sparked this progressive and humanistic treatment of the mentally ill in the Muslim world and the growth of astounding institutions of healing that Muslims became famous for? There is no other explanation stronger than the advent of Islam. The various Quranic injunctions and hadith that implored Muslims to take good care of those with mental illnesses. You see, one of the main principles of Islam, maqasad ash-shari'ah, is a preservation and
optimization of one's mental capacity and intellect. This, combined with the saying of the Prophet ﷺ that for every illness, there is a cure, tada'u ibadallah, seek out cures, O servants of God, for Allah has placed with every ailment a cure. This helps us to understand why the scholars in the Muslim world paid such special attention to understanding the psyche and the way it affects human behavior and how and why it becomes ill, and focused on finding cures for their illnesses. In this video, we're going to discuss how this combination of Islamic motivation, inspiration, methodology likely led to the foundational accomplishments and contributions to the field that today we call psychology. So, the most important takeaway is that it was Islam's holistic outlook on life that led the scholars from all different disciplines to contribute to the field they called al-munnafs, the study of the self, that became the precursor to the study of psychology. And that is why for Muslims, psychology was never limited just to the field of science or focused just on the mind the way it is today, but rather it was a holistic model that was famously described by Imam al-Ghazali, that the heart was at the center and connected to it was the mind, body, soul, and emotions. It was an interdisciplinary effort of philosophers, theologians, physician-scientists, all of whom contributed to this field. Long before the term psychology was coined, Muslim scholars were researching and practicing early forms of holistic psychotherapy, and they used medications to treat some psychiatric conditions as well, and they theorized about the inner workings of the human conditions and behavior. Now, many of these
scholars drew their inspiration and motivation from the Qur'an and the Sunnah, but they also used, and this is very important, they also used empirical and rational sources. You have, for example, al-Razi and his incredible case studies in the book of experience that he wrote, and you have Ibn Sina and his experimental psychological and diagnostic treatments and techniques. But at the end of the day, they believed the revelation held the ultimate truth and drew upon it to come to their conclusions. And there were so many different types of scholars that contributed to this field and made it holistic. From amongst the philosophers, you have two that we're going to cover today, Ibn Mishkawayh, who encouraged people to eliminate their unwanted habits and behaviors by establishing what he called a moral equilibrium. That when you engage in a bad habit, you fix it by doing the opposite positive behavior. For example, he drew from Surat al-Ma'idah where Muslims are taught that if they break an oath, they should feed the poor, and this helps them come back to moral equilibrium. You also have al-Kindi in his book al-Hila ladaf' al-Ahzan, that repelling the sorrows, and where he describes cognitive strategies for fighting depression. And from amongst the theologians, you have Imam al-Ghazali, who emphasized treating diseases of the heart, arrogance, miserliness, ignorance, envy, lust, greed, and encouraged spiritual training of the self, including cognitive and behavioral inclinations. You have Ibn al-Qayyim, for example, who proposed a sequential stage theory of cognition and behavior based on terms found in the Quran for thinking. Involuntary thoughts that lead to emotional motivation, that leads to firm decisions,
that then allows actions to finally become habits. Today we might call that the cycle of change, and that's unfortunately attributed to others. And then you have the physician-scientists. You have al-Balkhi, for example, who I'm going to speak about in much more detail in upcoming videos in this series, and that's whom some of my own personal research was about al-Balkhi, uncovering that he was likely the first in history to diagnose and classify OCD and phobias, literally a millennium before Western scholars who are credited with these discoveries instead. Al-Balkhi used arguments from the Quran and the Sunnah to dismantle social barriers to getting mental health help, and he called his book Masālih al-Abdān wa l-Anfus, or Sustenance of the Body and Soul, purposefully to focus on the mind-body connection. Then you have Abu Bakr al-Razi, who directed the largest hospital in Baghdad, including its psychiatric ward, and he was responsible for the first instance in history of psychiatric aftercare, where patients were discharged from his hospital, were given financial assistance to get back on their feet after leaving the psychiatric ward. He championed humane treatment of the mentally ill, and he wrote many case studies about this, and importantly, about the therapeutic rapport between the doctor-patient relationship, and he documented over 900 cases of patients, including those with mental illness like mood disorders and anxiety. He wrote a book called al-Tibb al-Rawhāni on the soul and the psyche, and discussed the psychological topics in light of the Quran and the Sunnah. And then we have Ibn Sina, one of the greatest physicians in the Muslim lands, known as the Doctor of Doctors, whose book The Canon of Medicine was used in European medical schools until the 18th century. He discussed the motivational powers of physical, cognitive,
and virtuous desires, and he organized a two-level hierarchy of desires, which now is attributed to Maslow instead of him, the hierarchy of needs. He also described in great detail the concept of conditioning, now attributed to Pavlov instead of him. And he too was a great champion of the mind-body connection. Much of the amazing advancements in the field of mental health took place at the hands of great Muslim predecessors, centuries, and in some cases, an entire millennium before the equivalent work of other scholars that are now often credited with these discoveries and findings. But why? Why are others credited with their discoveries? There are several reasons for this, but there is one reason that I want to bring to our attention today. And that is because we, as Muslims, have allowed our rich legacy of mental health to be buried in the dust of time. We have forgotten our own history and our own accomplishments, especially those of the Muslim predecessors, have come before us. And most importantly, that their great work was largely inspired and motivated by Islam. So for those who want to learn more about this topic in more detail, we have an entire research lab at Stanford University, the Muslim Mental Health Lab. And this very topic is one that we spend a lot of time researching, and I hope you'll check out the work we have on it. We've published several chapters and papers, and one of our most recent is called Islamic Psychology, a Portrait of His Historical Origins and Contributions. You can actually find this chapter in the new book that we partnered with the Khalil Center called Applying Islamic Principles to Clinical Mental Health Care. I ask that Allah ﷻ bless our scholars of the past, the present, and the future, and to allow us to rediscover our Islamic heritage and build upon the accomplishments
of our noble predecessors, and that like them, we too will be a benefit to all of humanity.
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