 Peace be upon you. How are you? Peace be upon you. How are you? How kind of you. Wonderful to spend time with you, Muneera and Nisa. I want to start with the story of your travel to Syria. Many of us here in the west would consider travel and especially overseas travel as a coming of age experience. A rite of passage, so to speak, into young adulthood. Why did you travel to Syria and why? And when? I traveled to Syria. We'll start there. Really, as, yes, it was definitely what ended up being a coming of age experience, absolutely. The story starts with a visit from a sheikh that came to the United States. We learned later actually, you know, in terms of for medical treatment for her own self, that while being in our community, she was able to gather some of the women and girls of the community and say, you know, let's have a halaka, let's have a class together and see what's happening with American Muslims. What's the story there? And I was so intrigued by this concept of a woman scholar. I was intrigued by the concept of, wow, there are such scholarly people who are not men, masha'Allah. And while that's wonderful that we have our sheikh, it was such a new experience for me. I was a very young teenager. I want to say either I was 12 or 13 at the time. And I remember coming home telling my parents wherever this person is from and whatever she did, whoever she is and whatever it is, I want to go there and I want to be like that, subhanAllah. And it turned out that she was from visiting from Damascus, Syria. This is well before the war, of course. And my family is not Syrian. And so they thought that this would be a very difficult thing to do, but they said, okay, and they noted it. Some months later, not too long, much longer later, you know, my parents came to me and said, you know, when you told us you wanted to go to Syria to study, an opportunity has come up, would you like to go? And I thought, wow, they really listened to me. Like they listened to 13 year old kid telling them they want to go halfway across the world, masha'Allah. It turns out, of course, years later, I would find out that that particular sheikh had, you know, picked really some students to go and to study and to hopefully bring back knowledge to the United States and really be able to keep on the tradition of classical Islamic training, particularly amongst women. So that's my story of journey to Syria. It was not something where I thought one day I'd become a teacher or went to study for the betterment of really anyone other than my own self. But subhanAllah, the story there is when you do study, you have to pay forward what you've learned. And it's been a wonderful, just an amazing experience having really sat with women scholars and understood what that woman sisterhood, scholarly sisterhood could actually look like. So where are you? Where's 13 year old Rania Awad meeting this Syrian scholar? What part of the U.S. is this happening? And what is the journey to Syria like? At that time, I was in the Midwest. We lived, my parents and I and my family, we lived in Michigan. So she was visiting Michigan at the time. And Michigan has been a wonderful doorway for a lot of people who have actually went to Syria to study. Alhamdulillah. What that journey has been like is a series of visits. For me, that's what it looked like. I was a very young person for a summer study, almost like a study abroad situation. I was 14 at the time. And my desire was to stay there for an extended period of time. But I was very young and my folks were not quite ready for that. And so when I called them from Damascus on that first summer that I was there and said, could I stay longer? Or maybe my teenage self said something like, I planned to stay longer because you think you have the plans. They said, oh no, you're getting back on that plane and coming back. Alhamdulillah. I spent one summer that early on. And then it was quite a bit of work actually to get back to Damascus. For me, it looked like a series of trips. One of my parents finally agreed again, Alhamdulillah, with some years later, still in high school, but some years later. And it was just interspersed between my high school studies, my college studies, my medical school studies. And the war didn't start until I was in my residency actually. And I was still traveling back and forth kind of juggling both, you know, my medical studies and my Dean studies. So it sounds like there is this young woman who's, you know, who has her heart is in her spiritual growth. And she's physically, literally between two continents, separated by a vast ocean. And there is this pull that's happening over there. And at the same time, there is the high school, the college and the med school happening. So how is this formation happening, you think? And how are you, what is the intellectual journey that's happening at this moment? For me, a lot of it was really immense identity building, honestly. You know, this is a time where we talk about coming of age. It's also coming of age in terms of you, who am I exactly? Not just the family I was raised in, not just my religion and my faith, my identity. The parts of me that I was trying to grapple between my parents' culture and my American culture, the parts of me that's also trying to understand what does it mean to actually fully implement the religion the way we're taught it classically? And then I'm traveling overseas and that's a whole other dynamic as well. So when you think about trying to integrate all those parts, there's funny things that happen. Of course, especially as young people, sometimes we get overly carried away by certain things and sometimes we have to understand like, okay, that was actually a cultural aspect or artifact, not the faith itself and such, you know. So anyhow, this journey for me was definitely that my mindset at that point was I learned something so beautiful from one of those very early trips as a young person, do as much as you possibly can so that one day you don't look back and regret that you had missed out on any opportunities. And that was definitely my mindset. It was a go, go, go mindset of, you get as much as you possibly can. I had no idea, none of us had any idea the war would start in Damascus and we would be in Syria in general and we would be prevented, subhanAllah, from such a beautiful place of knowledge and light in the Muslim world for so many years until today. None of us knew that. It was really more of a drive of, we have to make sure that we can get as much as we're able to in that time where you have less responsibilities because the responsibilities only become more later. I want to circle back to your experience in Syria just a little bit later. But I think because it's spirituality we'll probably be in and out of our entire conversation. But let's fast forward to your medical school. You trained in Ohio and then you did your residency in fellowship at Stanford. Why did you pursue specializing in mental health? That's a very good question. It actually directly ties to what we were just talking about speaking of spirituality, subhanAllah. I do have a roundabout story. I've shared it a little bit before of how my interest really was going into a completely different direction. I didn't set out to do mental health or psychiatry at first. I had a strong interest in women's health and that was the work I was doing. And I had geared up my entire medical school studies because you take your, you know, when you come to do your practical portion of medical school you choose certain rotations that are going to gear you for the next step. And I had chosen all of them to be obstetrics and gynecology. I thought that's definitely the work I was going to see myself doing into the future subhanAllah. Allah had another plan. Mashallah. It was actually that having come back from my studies in Syria and starting to teach in the community, being asked to teach classes and halakas and various, you know, spiritual and religious based courses that it became really clear to me that actually a lot of the questions were beyond the textbook, beyond the halal and haram, beyond what does Islam say about X, Y or Z. It actually became clear that it was much more deeper questions, family questions, personal questions, things that actually were quite complicated sometimes. And I realized very quickly I was out of my depth as much as I had studied it by that point, which was maybe over a decade by that point. I had not, it's, you don't, if you haven't learned formally how to counsel and also what drives some of these questions that are coming forward. There's always a story behind the story. And an incident happened locally here, upon a lot that actually turned everything for me. And without going into too many details for confidentiality's sake, there was a young person in our community that experienced what today I can now have the language to explain was a psychotic break. But at that point in time, we didn't have the language, nobody did. Nobody around me, none of the other religious instructors or faculties or nobody had the knowledge to really explain what was this thing that was happening. And there's a, you know, a beautiful connection with Nisa actually, because one of your original founders, Dr. Rajab Ali was actually the person who helped even put words to what was happening and explained that this was actually in medical psychiatric condition that needed immediate attention. And the religious folk and others, you know, and even just the general community members, we tend to do this thing where we say, we see something that's not explainable immediately. So we go to the supernatural and we say, oh, this must be Jinn possession or it must be Iain or it must be one of these other factors. And so we want to treat it purely spiritually. And it was very eye-opening. And at that, in that, in that entire incident, my husband actually turned to me who also was a teacher and is a teacher in the community and said, look, Rania, if you really want to help this community and other communities, we really need people who have grounding and Islamic knowledge and studies to be able to understand mental health. This is going to, we need to bridge these two worlds together because there's very little bridging of them right now happening. And that changed my course of studies completely, Sopranomal. I almost at the last minute applied to psychiatry for my residency and landed in a field and in a world that was completely new to me once I got there. And really had to do a lot of deep diving into our own traditions and understandings in our own classical texts and books and Islamic knowledge to really pull out what now, Mashallah, is a treasure trove related to mental health that wasn't apparent right away to me. Yeah. Well, let's, you know, speaking of taking a deep dive into technical know-how, can you help some of our audience and myself included actually understand the difference between a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist? If you can just start with the beginning of some of these terms. Of course, of course. I'll start with a psychiatrist. I myself am a psychiatrist and that's a person who's gone through medical studies. They are an MD. They've gone through entire medical school and they have specialized in psychiatry. But their doctorate degree, their medical degree allows them to be able to prescribe medications just like any other physician might. And also they have basic trainings in general medicine and in general surgery. They've gone through all of that same training. But this specialty is in psychiatry. Whereas a psychologist is also somebody who has reached a doctorate level degree as well. But they have not gone through medical school. They have gone through a graduate school of psychology. And their training is slightly different. They haven't done the full body system of what a physician may have. That they are at a doctorate level and they are able to diagnose and they are able to do therapy. But they do not prescribe medications. A psychotherapist may be a psychologist as well. But they also may be someone who is at the master's level. So they've done two years of graduate school after their college studies and have done supervised hours for their licensure. And they only do therapy. So I hope that's a bit of a helpful explanation. That is. Because I have also personally wondered what different rules are and what sort of help one should be seeking out for. And that brings me to my next question. How does one determine that they need help? And what then should they do to ask for help? And where I'm asking this question, especially in the context of domestic violence. Right. And so when a person has experienced any sort of difficulty, domestic violence being one definitely such broadly and more broadly speaking than abuse and even more broadly speaking, any turbulence, any difficulty that's come forward. There are different specialties for different conditions. So for example, if a person has reached, has experienced like the case I was mentioning earlier, something that's very difficult, like a psychotic break. At that point, you need to absolutely get to emergency care right away. And at that point, it really needs to be high level care. So psychiatric care will be necessary. If you also have, if it's not quite that level of difficulty, but it may be something that's moderate or mild even, please do not ignore those things. Those are things that actually need intervention as well. But they may not need a psychiatric emergency room or a physician per se. They may require therapy. So part of that would be actually reaching out to professional care. And often those who are trained know how to tell you this is beyond my scope. Actually, we need to refer up or they may say actually what you need is more like therapy. Let me refer you to a therapist. So the first step really is, is even just taking that first step to be connected. And if you don't quite connect in the right direction, usually that professional could help you guide you to the next correct connection. So what should a patient expect when they walk into your clinic? So my clinic, my personal clinic as you mentioned earlier is through Stanford University. And in the community, I supervise the work that's at Maristown. So there's the different settings between something that happens at a big facility like Stanford or if it's a community clinic like Maristown. There's some similarities, but there's also some differences. First step is always going to be the same. There's initial contact made. It's usually a phone call or if there's a form on their website that person fills out and says, I'm in need of care. Usually there's an intake person that they'll speak to on the phone or we'll also give them forms to fill out. So the first thing to know is very logistical that there is some paperwork involved. Usually a person doesn't pick up a phone and immediately get connected to a therapist or psychiatrist. There's usually some paperwork to do first. I say that only because I have found that sometimes people might find themselves in a real emergency situation and we have to remind them that those acute very emergency kind of issues require actually going to an urgent care or an ER or somewhere that has 24 care. The clinics that are out like my own or that in the community, whether it's Stanford or Maristown are not set up in that way. They're set up for something that is much less acute and so much less urgent. And so what happens is a person would call, fill out the paperwork, they would do their checking to make sure it all fits in terms of one's insurance, one's financial background, that the matching is done and then from there has the very first session. And let's say they're assigned to me. I'll do an intake session with them. That first session is not a therapy. It's actually just a lot of gathering information. What happened? What's your background? Who's your family? What's your family background? What happened to you before? I had just lots of questions that helps us as the clinician understand who we're working with. And one of the most important questions is, what are you hoping to get out of this? Those are guiding questions. From there we can just set this aside. Is there, for example, as a psychiatrist, somebody might have already a medical background or medications they're taking. I take an entire history on that. And maybe that's they need that in addition to the therapy. Maybe it's only a therapy situation where at that point we decide what kind of therapy is needed. So there's a lot of discussions in that very first session, which is more like an introductory session of fit. Is it a good fit? Do I have what I can, what you need? And then from there we decide on timings and locations and length of time we might work together. And that's typically how other clinicians do it as well with some slight variations. And then the therapy starts from there. Help us do away with some of the taboo or the stigma around mental health, especially having to do with therapy. Yeah, for me, I mean, I mentioned how when I was so new into the field and I have to say not just new, but very suspicious of the field. Like any other Muslim that I had grown up in my generation and my community that I had grown up in, there was just a lot of negativity around mental health. But this is not part of our Dean. This is not something Muslims need. This is not our background. This is a Western thing or people would say it's an American thing as though we weren't Americans or they would say some other thing. And that's just the mindset I personally had too. And the reason that's important is when I entered into the field and it helps answer your question too, I had to literally deprogram myself from a lot of those stigmas myself. I hadn't taken a single course in psychology in college because I thought, well good Muslim girl needs a psychology class. And Allah has a way of humbling you. Honestly, it's part of that for me what happened in the deep dive that I spoke about is actually going into our tradition to understand is there a precedence for therapy in our Islamic tradition? Is this something that our scholars from before had even suggested? And I was so pleasantly amazed and surprised at so many things that we uncovered in this process and anybody who's interested can welcome to look at the work in my lab to stand for Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology lab and all that we've unearthed over time. But one thing that I'll share right now out of a lot of many things is therapy. That Muslims were some of the very first people if not to found certain types of therapy, they definitely expounded on it and used it heavily in their traditional Muslim societies and in their healing centers called the Matastans which is of course the namesake of our organization. And that concept was so powerful to me because it shook so many of the stigmas and barriers that I personally had and others around me had to for talk therapy because we would be told things culturally from our parents and elders, don't air your dirty laundry. Why are you talking to a stranger about things that are happening at home and in our family and so on? Of course worried about confidentiality. What will the community hear if some of this was leaked out? That's a big thing that tends to come up for many people and for others it's just foreign. They were not used to talking to others outside of the family about their issues. So for me it was so powerful to see that this was something not only the early Muslims who understood kind of that holistic care utilized but they really developed it. And there's more we could share about therapy but for me that was kind of a big breakthrough I would say. So I know Dr. Rania, you have a deep understanding of the legacy of mental health that we've inherited in our Islamic civilization. Give us a sense of some of the paradigms and theories that you uncovered and then we're able to see parallels off as you were going through your rotation and residency. Yeah. For me, Subhanallah, some of the things we were able to uncover as you mentioned, I wanted to understand when a person in a traditional Muslim society historically had what today would be a mental health issue. What did they do? How were they treated? How did others around them get treated? Treat them and what kind of care was there even? And what that led to was an entire line of research that's in my lab that's specifically focused on historical understandings of mental illness and another line that's called Islamic psychology amongst the 12 other lines that are in our lab for research. But those two lines there, it was amazing to be able to understand that the Muslims when they talked about what today you call psychology which is the root word in Greek, right? The psyche for them also meant the spirit and the soul. Alogia is the study of, so psychology was the study of the spirit and soul. The Muslims call this an Arabic al-Munefs, the study of the self. It wasn't that far apart. It's only in modern Western psychology, unfortunately that modern psychology loses its soul, quote, unquote, that they stopped really talking about this. But early on, Muslims and non-Muslims were both working on this. And what you find it's very interdisciplinary and that becomes important because you realize it's not just the physicians that are working on or scientists who are working on psychology like you find today. Usually this is how psychology is usually housed in the school of medicine, right? Or in the schools of sciences. But clinical psychology, but when you look historically in Muslim heritage you find that actually it was interdisciplinary. You had physicians contributing and you also had your scholars of religion contributing. This is very important, right? But they're also writing on spirituality and spiritual understandings of the psyche. And you also have your philosophers contributing. Without going into a big story, I'll just say that the flavor of Islamic psychology actually is very different and more holistic than our modern psychology today. And so what we uncovered in all of that is the treatments that they had, the classification of illnesses and diagnosis and also the treatments reflected that. It wasn't just medications. It wasn't just here's a pill, it'll solve your problem. There was therapy, talk therapy because that was powerful and a powerful tool for treatment. But so was using all your other senses. If that's a cognitive sense, what about your eyes, your nose, your ears, your face, so on. And so they had sound therapy. Today we'd call music therapy. The Muslims did that. They actually had that as part of their main treatment process and customized it to specific mental illnesses. They used color therapy and art therapy. And this is reflected in their institutions of healing the Matastans. And I say all of this because when people realize how extensive the Muslim civilization's honored mental health and treated it, all of those stigma start to fade away. Do you think your founding of Matastan has been able to capture some of these varieties of therapies? This is our goal, inshallah. This will be a long, a long process. If you can imagine the Matastans were founded, the very first of them, which are the Islamic hospitals. Some say that they're in the seventh century, some in the eighth century. There's some discrepancy historically, but the point is right after the advent of Islam and they go everywhere Islam goes. They become a fixture of the Islamic societies, the way your mosques do, the way your madrasas do, or your Matastans. They go everywhere Islam goes. All throughout the Muslim world, all into Europe, everywhere that Islam was. And therefore they are there as an institution of healing all the way until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And then you start to see kind of the cropping up of what today would be the modern hospital system, which by the way the blueprint used is the Matastan, inshallah. But then you have kind of a neglecting of that very holistic institution. So to answer your question, it'll take us some time to rebuild and revive that heritage, but that's absolutely my goal, inshallah. Inshallah. I sincerely hope so. You know, I've been a student of history and you know, we've learned about the the empire of course, the taxation system, the agriculture, the architecture, but never in my textbook have I come across the institution of the Matastan. Yeah. That's amazing. Inshallah, our new book is coming out in about a year from now. We're currently working on it and that I've signed a contract for it and inshallah in time, there will be a very robust resource on the Matastans, inshallah. So now we're speaking in the Nisa context. What does your Matastan today offer survivors of domestic violence? Definitely very important. The, you know, in a previous iteration of the work I did in the community, we had an MOU, a memorandum of understanding with Nisa. And I would love to see this be the case for our organization at Matastan, but really for any organization that has mental health, that has nearby to it a local Muslim organization focused on domestic violence. I really think that the two have to work hand in hand. In the previous work that I did, I saw that when there was this memorandum of understanding, you had a shared therapist and you had shared work. So if somebody needed that assistance and help, that specialized assistance and help, there was a direct channel of care and services. And that's kind of my goal absolutely as well. In addition, of course, I mean like this in education and so on, but the direct services is really key. So I want to take a little bit into this relationship that domestic violence survivors have with God, with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You know, through some of the spiritual halakas that Nisa's organized, we found that many survivors of hardship, individuals that are struggling are disappointed in God and they're prone to giving up on faith. How would you advise them to reconnect to their Creator? This is such an important question when either honestly, it is so common. I want to first, first, first thing I want to say is it is so common for when a person goes through any sort of trial or tribulation to disconnect, to question, to ask, why me or how come or is God still seeing me, helping me, what's happening? I say that only to normalize that these are normal emotions and so much so that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala spoke about them in the Quran and showed us through the prophets that they too asked questions that they too wondered why it is that they had difficulties that have come to them, that they too were taught of course to be patient and to persevere through it but it didn't mean that they didn't feel emotion with it. In fact, there was a lot of sorrow and grief and heaviness that so many of our prophets we learn our Islamic tradition to be the best of all of humanity the best of all people and if the best of all people have heavy emotions of sorrow and grief and really questioning if this heavy load that they received is worth it in some ways then imagine the ordinary person like us and so I say all of this to just normalize that these are normal that this is bound to happen but the beautiful thing about our Islamic tradition is there's also help stories, we have a lot of stories of the prophets and we have a lot of du'az that we're taught to recite and just moral character traits that we're taught in how exactly to persevere through difficulty and we're also taught advocacy we're taught to advocate for ourselves to speak up to get help and not to shy away from that whether it be something happening to ourselves or someone that we know in our loved ones sometimes it's also an abandonment from our own communities when something like this happens we find that there's no one there to support us and so that too needs to be anecdoted so anyhow I hope that in understanding how normal this is but also knowing that there is in fact help through it really starts a person to feel what they can be reconnected again Talk to us Dr. Rania about why suicide is a taboo topic in the Muslim community Subhanallah that is definitely one of the most difficult conversations of all I call suicide and this is where before I talk I'd like to just give a trigger warning we probably should have given this one even before this topic here let's say that what we have been talking about these last few minutes actually is pretty heavy and so I just want to invite anyone who feels that they have been triggered or it's difficult to take a step away and pause for a bit and rejoin us when they can like the topic of domestic violence suicide is also a difficult topic I call it personally the taboo within the taboo it's even within mental health and mental health is now getting more airtime than it ever has in the society in general but definitely in our Muslim communities much much more than before and still more work has to be done but suicide is still a big taboo it's something that is often just hush hush or when you do start talking if you try to talk about it you're told we don't want to put ideas in people's heads which of course the research has proven that that's never the case or it's just simply masked as something else an accidental death of some sort and when that happens we don't ever really get to the root of the problem we don't ever really get to why this is the case and what to do in order to help prevent because out of all the mental health conditions it's really important for people to realize that suicide out of all the mental health conditions we have is 100% preventable it's really really key to understand that if we can do proper justice as communities in terms of awareness prevention and even intervention measures we can avoid it all together and not have to worry about post-vention which is basically what happens in a crisis mode after a suicide has happened and so we haven't hummed it down materials on all three of these aspects that we developed in the lab and Madison offers a training of course for this for first line responders, community leaders and so on but I just want to say that again if we can as a Muslim community not treat this as the taboo and have every so often have an awareness event you're more likely to catch those who might be at risk well before they're actually at risk well before they're actually at harm's way now the findings of your research were published in JAMA which is a prestigious medical journal Journal of American Medical Association correct when you take those findings to massage it how is your work received by the audience more than before I would say and perhaps this is an effect of the pandemic it's much more received now than it had been in the past in fact I say this and those who are on our promo video know this that we have a little video on our website at Madison where we have a series of imams shiuch and shaykhat who are talking about the importance of suicide and awareness in the Muslim community and to get the trainings for it and all of them have actually been through our trainings but you know what I say is really important in that just a few years prior to that trying to have that same conversation at sometimes even with some of the very same people had been impossible it was very difficult and it was something that was you know it's almost like out of sight, out of mind we don't want to see it, we want to think about it however before the pandemic certainly but definitely during the pandemic it became really really clear that the levels of isolation that people were feeling the loneliness, the being kind of we saw the spikes and numbers in the general global community the general national community and certainly our own community our Jama paper reflected some of that where there was definitely an increase in the Muslim population, American Muslim population that we had seen ever before and to try to understand what that is and how to prevent it became really important and so did your findings tell you something about how the suicide rate amongst American Muslim adults compares to suicide rates in society at large? It was a cross-sectional study partnered with the ISP the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding as well as with some other organizations and in our findings it was cross-sectional in that you had Muslims compared with people of all other faith groups Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu you also had people of no faith atheists, agnostics and they were all compared side-by-side, cross-sectional and the finding which was very interesting actually but when we have a lot of work to do to try to change this was that Muslim Americans had twice the rate of suicide attempts than other faith groups not deaths by suicide that's not something we studied in that particular study but rather attempts and of course we know attempts increased attempts will lead to increased deaths at some point right so those are definitely a real concern there and hence they're really needing to drum up a campaign now on suicide awareness and prevention and what were some of your findings as to the reasons? the reasons is something that we're doing a parallel study to determine so what I could tell you is what is in the literature so far but the studies are still ongoing and so when they're completed I'd be happy to share more so far what we can find in literature is two main things the theories of suicide say that a feeling of increased levels of burdensomeness feeling like someone is a burden on whether it's their own family their own community or even if you extended globally nationally someone or number two an increased sense of not feeling like you belong and American Muslims especially in the last several years even before the pandemic social politically the last several years and then add to that a pandemic those are all very real things that the American Muslim community broadly has been experiencing so it was not, it was upsetting to see those numbers but I get it's not all together shocking is there a causal relationship between domestic violence and suicide? there's definitely a causal relationship not the one that we studied in that particular study but in general there are connections okay thank you, I think as you said the last 10-12 minutes of our conversation have been heavy but thank you for allowing me to take you down that road and delve into some of these questions that have been on my mind I did want to explore this something different with you you've pursued classical Islamic studies in Damascus, Syria the first female professor of Islamic studies at Tuna College your founding member of the Rahmah Foundation tell us the way I understand your spiritual work is that it's sort of, it's women focused and women centered and to borrow western humanities language, this is feminism in its own right have you ever been labeled as a Muslim feminist? do you readily take it on? do you bypass it? what's going on over here in this very powerful women centered women led spiritual experience? it's exactly as you said it is a women centered women empowered experience and I find no need for labels personally the reality is this is what I've heard my teacher say too and I love it, the proof is in the pudding if there is something that is strong and empowered and literally shakes up a community around you it makes people think differently and brings them into a fold, empower them really is the word I'm looking for here as you mentioned joining some of our Qiyam programs where you're able to see so many different types of women from all different walks of life in terms of women scholars and perhaps even pray behind them and be able to feel motivated by their words this in itself is an experience when we say the proof is in the pudding if you can taste it, it's there I don't need to put anything extra put it up in any other way or put anybody else's labels onto them certainly every term carries its own baggage and has its own strings attached I don't need strings attached here because I know what's being represented here is really that Islamic tradition that I saw firsthand having traveled as a young person to Damascus and I was amazed and awed of all these women scholars who are memorizing the Quran and able to teach the number of women scholars that have authored heavy hitting Islamic texts studies and when people say where are the women scholars of Islam and I would just sort of point to my bookshelf and go they're right there but to connect people to even realize that because here in America I find that sometimes we're disconnected from those experiences and so a lot of the work of the Rahmah Foundation was to do just that provide a platform for teachers and teachers and for other women and girls to be connected to that and be empowered by it share with us a personal story or a moment where you said this work is really overturning secular feminist assumptions about Muslim women yeah or some of that work is overturning but yeah this is just this is women empowerment in our own way because sometimes when you're in the weed of doing things it doesn't really you don't appreciate what it is that you're doing until somebody else says something or does something and you say whoa Masha'Allah take a step back I hear you very clearly and I say our work here is still young and ongoing especially after the war when after the war happened it's exactly people are on the go go go and then suddenly something so major happened that made everybody essentially have to be spread all over the world so many of our teachers went to so many other parts of the world for safety reasons and then you could see so clearly what they had produced over decades of time in the hundreds and hundreds of Quran scholars the hundreds and hundreds that have become people who are able to narrate all the chains of narration for Hadith literally the hundreds who have become scholars of the utmost quality whether it's you name it when you take a step back and you realize how many women were raising now families in which the girls and their boys were affected by this beautiful spiritual awakening then you take a step back and you realize how much actual work that actually happened subhanAllah and anyhow I say this because I forget sometimes I'll take a small tangent but a good friend of mine that many of you know Sheikh Amariyah Amir Ibrahim released an app this past Ramadan called the Qariah app it was an app that had the entire Mus'af read in women's voices scholars of the Qud'an who are women who are reading either whole surahs or portions of it the reason I say this whole story there was so much excitement around that app because so many women and girls had said I've never heard the Qud'an recited by a woman in the way you might hear on your Qud'an app that a man recites or at the message that the e-man might read and I thought to myself and I was one of the biggest advocates and cheerleaders for this app but I was so amazed every time I would hear that and I'd realized the experience I had in Damascus and Syria was so different than so many women that had never actually let alone Medeshecha let alone heard somebody who had actually was a woman scholar of Qud'an that had an Ijazah in it and was teaching it and reciting it beautifully the way you might hear the men recite and that's when you take a step back and you go wow what happens here was a beautiful sense of empowerment and I don't need the kind of labels and terms that come with it baggage that may dilute some of that excellent empowerment or try to phrase it or stuff it within a cup of something that it doesn't fit within because this is not an anti-man or an anti-anybody for that matter kind of effort this is purely woman being connected to their lord and to sisterhood. Dr. Rainer you've seen the tragedy of war and the abruptly stop this scholarship from flourishing you've worked closely probably on a daily basis with individuals who are dealing with mental health crises including suicide how does that affect your world view? Yeah the work of anybody who's experienced war-torn situations and my experience is really nothing more than simply wanting to give back and to do something after all this happened to a country and to people that had given me so much and so some of my mental health work has been focused on refugee mental health in which I would travel back not directly into Syria but to neighboring countries in Jordan and some of the efforts have now gone into Lebanon and Turkey where there were a lot of Syrian refugees and really just trying to talk about the invisible wounds of mental health trauma and yes it does change your world view and it kind of shapes it and gives it another edge if you will there's so many stories I won't take all the time here today of course to share the stories but I've learned so much from the resilience of people that have gone through those situations even spiritually I've been in situations where I'm doing a psychiatric assessment purely mental health if you will trying to seek asylum status in a safer country and felt that I was like I was sitting in front of a sheikh receiving spiritual education from the kind of resilience and mindset and world view that a person who's had all the terrible things this world can do to you have done to them and still be able to say Alhamdulillah and I rely on God for the next step so when you hear that kind of strengthen those words it's not just hot air it's not just saying doing lip service to these words it's someone who's been through real deep trauma and they're also coming through and getting help by the way in therapy and all the rest we talked about for that trauma but when they say those words I depend on Allah that is not lip service that is truly their aid coming through to the point that I had to go you say Alhamdulillah to each of these terrible things you've just told me and be taught by them what else do you say they're right and those moments are there's nothing in my clinic or nothing in my studies that I can compare them to real life learning we're almost approaching the hour we're going to ask you some of my just some question that will bring our conversation to full circle and give us some food for thought moving forward what would you like to see done more in the community to make topics such as mental health suicide, domestic violence more amenable for discussion more and more education definitely the more we talk about this openly and I welcome this conversation and I consider you all to be very courageous to take it on the whole organization is incredibly courageous and important I want to see more of this work and conversations at all of society's levels all of our community's levels so whether it be with the scholarly level the imams whether it be the leadership those who hold some sort of title in the community I want to see it more on the youth side in their discussions I want to see it more with our aunties and uncles I want to see it in different languages I want to see it with different sectors of the society I want it to be in different corners in which there could be a get together and there's some chit chatting happening and mental health becomes a topic of conversation and people check in on each other and they ask each other or they suggest to each other hey we know some resources can we help connect you right for people to even have a common language that's something that's even brought up we'll still have some ways to go but I'll tell you having been doing this for a few decades now it's it's a lot more than it had ever been before so I'm very hopeful actually you know I also think that on an institutional level when you have organizations collaborating look at today's collaboration between Nissa and between Maristan when you have organizations collaborating you bring the best of both worlds and you kind of make it even better you connect even deeper we may not have all the resources on domestic violence you have but we may have some mental health resources you may not have and we kind of bridge the two together the more those collaborations happen the stronger the services will be the more holistic and quality they will actually be in Shalom can you give us some food for thought one could feel driven to have some of these conversations from how one could draw strength for this conversation from within their spiritual self yeah definitely I think for me that's what I go back to all the time in order to like fuel kind of like a cargo running on empty, how do you refuel yourself it's from the spiritual conversation honestly it's and I encourage people to do this when you are able to tap into that all the beautiful tools that this religion has given us I know people try today to do meditation and whatnot and we have our own forms of contemplative meditation and other forms of connecting with God you find yourself refueled and you're able to take on heavier and more difficult even just aspects of your own life, forget anybody else's communities, just even your own circles and that's where the conversation actually starts if people were to say to your earlier question I'll add this, if people were to say I'm going to start this with my own family this conversation, my own friend circle we've all been we've all been affected by the pandemic there is nobody here that hasn't had some mental health effect of the pandemic what if I started my own circles asking now that people are coming more and more out of the pandemic and back out into society and things are resuming to say how is your mental health? just as direct as that sometimes or if you need to couch it in some way because it's an elder or someone to do so but to ask, how is someone actually doing and not to be worried I love by the way I had a Stanford student reach out to me just the other day and say I was helping them with something difficult and serious and then they reached out and said how is someone actually doing I thought, wow to have someone much younger than you and someone who's it might feel odd it's like someone who's your elder who's your teacher and so on to ask them but it's so important because we're all human at the end of the day what if we did that first our communities, our friends our circles, our little get-togethers and chit chats can you imagine the ripple effect that would happen Satharani, I feel like your spiritual tank all this fills up others whether one comes out of your Friday night Kleyam or Ramadan Kleyam or just any of your other works and my takeaway from today's conversation has been there is the really a holistic understanding of mental health you refer to psychology you refer to philosophy and then spirituality at the same time and in your halaqas you've always you've insisted on highlighting both the the secular knowledge of your speakers so to speak or the science that they're grounded in as well as their spiritual work and I really appreciate all of that that you do would you like to close our conversation with the Dua I would love to and thank you before I do that I just wanted to say thank you again to Nissa, thank you Manita and thank you too I know there's a whole team behind these efforts I'm thanking everybody in the background as well and I just want to say too before we do the Dua that I hope that this is a start of many more conversations like this because any one of the topics we touched on are enough forgive my shortcomings please and hopefully they just opened up our thoughts a little bit more so with that we'll close Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Inshallah Ya Rabbi we ask you for the best in all of this dunya and in the best in the Akhira and to relieve us Ya Rabbi Al-Alamin from trials and tribulation and allow us Ya Rabbi to see the fruits of our labor in the Akhira Wa Alhamdulillahi Rabbi Al-Alamin Wa Sallallahu Alaa Sayyidina Muhammad Wa Alaa Aalihi Wa Sahbihi Wa Salam Al-Jama'in Ameen Thank you very much It's been my pleasure Thank you so much again Wa Alaikum As-Salaam Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh