 I'd like to take you, inshallah, today on a journey that's a little bit of my own journey. It's a journey from about 10 years ago now in which we were working on, personally for me, a personal journey on this topic of mental well-being. We're just emerging out of a pandemic and for those who have not been really tuned in to the discussion on mental health and mental wellness, I think you are now, inshallah. For me though, as a product of my own community and like many of you, held a lot of stigmas and internalized discomforts related to this field of psychology or psychiatry and such. And so I'm going to share with you a story in which I'm at the tail end of my training at Stanford University where I did my psychiatry training. And my work for those of you who know prior to my story, prior to this, is that I am a teacher of the Dean and, Alhamdulillah, somebody who has studied for many years. In fact, that room right there is where we have our women's halakah every single Friday night with the Rahmah Foundation here at the MCC before there was really this carpeting in the MCC and before programs really even took place here at the MCC. The women were here, the Rahmah Foundation were here, the girls were here doing their work, Alhamdulillah. I share with you the story in which I was reviewing manuscripts. Having studied the Sharia, we study the traditional texts, the old texts, 7th, 8th, 9th century texts, Arturath. And for me, my journey, my interest in this was where does the Muslims fit in the story of mental health because we have so many taboos and stigmas in our community about this topic. Is there a connection at all? As I was reading, one of the texts that I came across was a lesser known scholar from the 9th century. He's somebody that I didn't really know anything about or it's not a name that you would recognize right away like some of the famous scholars or physicians of our Muslim heritage. As I was reading his books, I was really struck. Each of the chapters in which he was writing, it seemed to me as someone who was newly trained as a psychiatrist, was talking about depression, anxiety, even obsessive compulsive disorder, what we would call OCD. It blew me away because what we had studied in school and in my training program at the most prestigious universities said that illnesses like OCD were modern illnesses only discovered in the 19th century, fully classified and diagnosed and they were only conditions that were found in Europe, typically by white psychologists. But here I was reading a text from the 19th, from the 9th century, not the 19th century, a millennium earlier. And what I saw there really struck me. Down the hall from my office was the preeminent scholar on OCD in the country. He was at Stanford and the person who wrote all the textbooks on this topic. I finally mustered enough courage to walk down the hall and knock on his door. And I said, I think I found something here that shows that OCD is actually discovered much earlier than what's written in the books and that we study in our programs. And he said, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. Very nice guy, but he said, I'm a history buff. And he starts pulling off papers that he published from his shelf. He said, here are the Romans, and here are the Greeks, and here is this, and here is this. There is no evidence that this was discovered prior. And I said to him what now was the famous question, but can you read an Arabic? And he said, no, can you? I said, yes. And he did what every professor does. Fine. Go translate it and come back. I said, okay. I sat down and diligently translated that chapter and came back and presented it to him side by side. The criteria we today use as psychiatrists in the DSM are manual for diagnosis. And Al-Balkhi, this is the name of the scholar from the 9th century, Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi, his criteria that he used. And when you look what's now published in the paper, line by line by line by line, he had figured out the correct classification, diagnosis, and treatment for this illness in the 9th century. This professor who otherwise was kind of hand waving, started jumping, jumping in my office, jumping. And he said to me, you must publish. I wasn't thinking of publishing. This was a personal journey, personal reading. And so we did. You could read it today in the Journal of Affective Disorders. And we then published another paper on Al-Balkhi and his discovery of phobias and his correct treatment of it. Either an illness, if we're an illness, either a cure or a treatment. And that matches modern medicine, where some things we have treatments and some things we have cures. Subhanallah. It doesn't stop there. That then led to a long discovery. And in fact, the creation of my lab at Stanford called the Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab, the first of its like in the country. Alhamdulillah. Maybe the world. But the point is, in the work that we do on research and Muslims and mental health, some of which is now published with Yaqeen, partnered with them, some of the work that we have found, is that these scholars didn't just write theory. They took theory into practice. This last year, my lab interns and I have been working on a book. And the book is about the institutions of healing that the Muslims created. You see something very special happened when you understand that Islam is a holistic religion that talks about mind, body and soul together, intertwined and you never separate these out. Then you can understand that why there are healing centers and treatment centers are connected, all of them together. Today, modern medicine feels very segmented. Healing feels very segmented. Literally we say that literature says psychology, quote, lost its soul. It literally did, even though early on that was the point of studying psychology. Today, Subhanallah, we have something that we need to do as the modern Muslims in this community that have a lot of wonderful opportunities. I think it's high time that we actually do a revival of our own tradition, that we know it, understand it, read it, but also revive it. Let me tell you what these scholars did. This last year, hopping around from Cairo to Istanbul to different countries across the world, looking at these healing institutions, those of you who speak Farsi or Urdu, you know the word Bimar. Yes? Illness. You know the word Stan. Location. The Bimar Stan was literally the location, the healing centers for illness that the Muslims created. Those of you who speak Arabic, you understand, dar-o-shifa, the abode or center of healing. This is what Muslims called their hospitals. Their hospitals were not like modern-day hospitals today, very sterile and very kind of hard to really access and you don't feel a real sense of healing. Many people are scared of hospitals. Their healing centers were in the middle of nature. Their healing centers had the beautiful Islamic architecture that you would expect, the beautiful symmetry. They incorporated in it sound, aroma therapy, smell, colors, fountains, greenery, and the treatment team, if you look at it, is interdisciplinary. It wasn't just doctors and nurses, but they also had what today we would call social workers, taking care of what the needs of the patients were day to day. They also had the dietitian and the pharmacist making medications. And they had the religious scholar, the Imam, the person who today we would call a hospital chaplain. All of this care team rotated together on each and every patient every morning to see how they were doing. And all of this was supported by the Waqf, the endowments, people who wanted their legacy, their Sadaqajariah, their ongoing charity to be helping others who were ill because of the sunnah of treating and visiting the ill. Let me tell you what else. Our research is showing something very special. Today you can still walk into some of the Madestans and be Madistan is shortened into Latin to Maristan. Now you know the connection. When you look at the Madestans across the Muslim world, you'll see something very special. You'll see that it spans the entire region of Islam. Everywhere Islam went, you're familiar with the Masajid, the houses of Allah where we pray. You're familiar with the importance of education. So the Madadis, the Madrasa, the educational system, everywhere Islam went. But are you familiar with the Madestans? That everywhere Islam went, it had healing institutions that they built. From the tip of Africa, all the way into North Africa, whether you're in Egypt or whether you're in Turkey or whether you're up in Bosnia or Uzbekistan or over in Spain, or whether you're all the way in the far regions in India and in Iran. Madestans were everywhere that Muslims had. Why am I pressing this point? When you enter into the Madistan, what you find is a section on surgery, award on surgery, award or section for internal medicine, your internal organs, a section for ear, nose and throat, and a section on psychiatry. Did you know this? Did you know that Muslims were the first in human history to our research, were the first to put in institutions of psychiatric treatment in their hospitals. Why am I saying this? Part of this is our stigma, our lack of information, our lack of knowledge on our own heritage. Sisters and brothers, as I close here, I want to tell you something. I have a call to you because I received a call yesterday and it was a call from some folks on the East Coast, just yesterday. And they said to me, we have purchased 10 acres, beautiful land with a creek running through it and some buildable areas. Will you come build us in Madistan? And I said to them, inshallah, but where is my community? Where is my people? Those of you who have been attending the Holocaust in that room right there, week in and week out every year since this building existed. Those of you who have been here and had your daughters go through our Ar-Rahma programs and have graduated and become teachers and come back and teach in our programs, your women and your girls and our men and boys that have benefited from these programs, where are you? It's my ask for you. Today, inshallah, after Sheikh Amr's program, we have a second program that's on mental health. We have our panels that is coming, our Muslim therapists that are coming to talk about mental health and to answer your questions. In between there'll be the Halalfu truck, so please stay inshallah. And the table is in the back there, the Madistan table that I want you to stop at. I want to call out for those who want to support this Waqf and Endowment project. I want to call to the architects, to the designers. I want to call to those who are the entrepreneurs and the business people. I want to call out to the real estate people. I need to call out to this community to help us literally revive the modern day version of the Madistan, holding in the entire heritage of the Muslim past, understanding the beauty that it had, that holistic healing of mind, body, soul, not disconnected from each other, but also bridging it to modern science, application, and research, which, inshallah, our lab is able to do. So I pray inshallah with that, that it inspires you, come see us at the table, come talk to us, inshallah. And one more last thing, brother Minid kind of stole my thunder a little bit. But we're also announcing today a momentous day, inshallah. Yes, Sheikh Amr is here, yes. But incredibly momentous in that, we are opening the grand opening, inshallah, of the first Bay Area based, because we're born here and plan to stay here, inshallah, office of Madistan. Hamdorella, Hamdorella, thank you. Please talk with us and come visit us. We'll actually be showing the office, inshallah, that's in this building at MBC and amazing partners to us. And let us take that first step in the right direction to actually building full-on Maristans, inshallah.