4-5-17: Christian Nurses Interested to Know about the Islamic Values in serving their Muslim Patients!
Christian Nurses Interested to Know about the Islamic Values in serving their Muslim Patients!
A group of recent graduate students from the nursing department of EMU (Eastern Michigan University), who will start their job soon, visited the Islamic House of Wisdom today to learn more about the Islamic traditions in dealing with their Muslim patients in the hospitals.
The meeting this morning reminded me of almost 20 years ago when the late, M. Kay Siblani who herself originally was a nurse met with me to discuss some fundamentals about Islam in addition to issues like the impact of faith on healthcare delivery, clinical practices, tahara and cleanliness, modesty, terminal illness, hospice care and many other issues. The late, Key later wrote a book over 100 pages on the issues helpful for nurses to know about Islam and Muslims.
Today we had over an hour of conversation, question and answer, from sacredness of nursing career as an angelic service to people in pain to other related subjects. Also discussed general ignorance about Islam and the cancer of hatred, racism and Islamophobia to the concept of love, kindness, patience, peace and forgiveness both in Islam and Christianity.
I told the nurses that as you are helping and healing your patients with physical medicines in the hospitals, we try to turn our mosques in to spiritual hospitals and provide spiritual treatment.
The funny thing I told them, people get sick and come to the hospital because they get hurt by pain or scared of death but some of our attendees don’t always feel any urgency to come to the mosque because they don’t feel pain! Arrogance is an illness, greed is an illness, jealousy is an illness, selfishness is a sickness but instead of feeling pain, some may feel pleasure of these sicknesses and never feel the need to go to the emergency of spiritual hospitals. By the time they get the diagnoses, it might be too late to recover!
I concluded talking about the power of prayer even when doctors and nurses lose our hope!
Usually our office offers to our female guests to observe the scarf inside the mosque even if they are not Muslims, but today’s guests were welcomed by one of our new staff who was not aware that the scarves are kept in the prayer area, by the time they came up I had to welcome them with Islamic courtesy and hospitality. Till almost 40 years ago the ladies wouldn’t enter the Catholic Church without scarf. A lot to remember reflect and learn!