 Inshallah just a few remarks, just some thoughts, things that I've been thinking about in traveling across. What brought me here today to New York today is that tomorrow there's actually an entire training, a full day training for our imams, our religious leaders and spiritual leaders, our community leaders on the very difficult topic and I'm going to give my trigger warning because it is a difficult topic on the topic of suicide in Muslim communities and we're training them because we feel like it's really important for leaders on the front line to really know the red flags and know how it is to actually help and intervene. So that's what brings me here and in the meantime, Alhamdulillah, I have the blessing of being able to come to all of you tonight, in a couple of other communities in Jersey right before here and just reflecting kind of on those conversations that I've been having the last few nights and thinking about how for so many people, maybe not all of you in this room but so many of the other folks that I've spoken to, there's still a really deep stigma and difficulty in talking about mental health and really a feeling like it doesn't, like you were saying, doesn't actually feel like it belongs to us and that was me. That was my story, right? I shared with some of the sisters earlier, you know, we were talking about psychology in classes and I said and I revealed kind of what's transparent about but I actually didn't take a single psychology course in college. I didn't think this had anything to do with us and I share that because I think it's important to know a person's path, like where they came from and how they came to do the work they do today. It's important to know where they came from and for me I had that internalized stigma that I felt like I grew up with in my family and my community, friends, everybody around me, essentially had the same stigma. What is this psychology thing that doesn't have anything to do with us as Muslims? And long story short, I'm going to shorten the story because it's a very like roundabout story. Mashallah. I ended up having the opportunity and blessing to study overseas in Syria when it was, and I'm not Syrian, but I had the opportunity to study there when it was still a country that was safe and sound, especially for a woman to study. That's a whole other story for another time. Mashallah, it's a beautiful story. All the women's scholars of Damascus, Mashallah. In the process of studying and coming back and teaching in the community, it became really clear that there was a lot going on, that I didn't have the language or the understanding to really help, but I wanted to help. I had the textbook knowledge of Islam, Hanan, Haram, Yes, No, Fiqh rules. That was my specialty, which is Fiqh, Islamic law, and could give a lot of answers. But when people brought their life circumstances and their life questions, I was in above my head. And that's an important lesson in discussion for our religious leadership and community leadership to know when it is that you've reached your limits. And A, you need to refer to someone who's more learned in that, or if you want to do that work, that you yourself go and do that actual training, then I'll try to answer work into space that's not your lane. Subhanallah. And so for me, I was on a path of studying medicine. I thought I was going to do a completely different route of medicine. And it was actually, and this is where my husband, I thank him a lot Subhanallah. He kind of looked at me one day after we had a number of kind of series of incidents, the community on a religious level, where we didn't have words to explain what we were seeing. Today, I can tell you some of those cases were depression or trauma. Some of the probably the straw that broke the camel's back, I think for both of us was as a beautiful sister in our community, who just is a wonderful person who we didn't have the words to explain what was she was going through. And today I can tell you, it's called a first break psychosis. We didn't know what that was. And in that process, everybody, and I'm talking about so many people more learned than us who are saying, this is definitely some sort of jinn possession. This is some sort of aim, you know, evil eye, or, you know, kind of supernatural possession that's come to her. Or we're saying things like just have mercy, Rahmah, Rahmah, where's the mercy here? Nobody had the wherewithal, literally nobody had the wherewithal to say, we might need to take her to the emergency room. Nobody even connected that this could have been a medical emergency, literally. Right. And Subhanallah, the person who, this is interesting Subhanallah, the person who eventually said, I think she needs to go to the emergency room was one of our local dentists. You know, Subhanallah, who had somewhere with all of that this could be psychosis. That night, I remember my husband looked at me and said, look, I was going into women's health. And he said, so many women, so many wonderful doctors who are well trained can do that work. But not a whole lot of people have the Dean Sharia training to be able to then also bridge it to mental health. And I said to him, what are you doing? What are you saying? Because the back and funny story to the whole story is I was so far into my medical school training at that point that all my letters of recommendation literally said OB. So when I literally pivoted into psychiatry at the last minute without even planning it, this is a lost plan. My letter is still said OB. And so I go to these, you know, residency training interviews and the program directors would read all this and be wonderful, wonderful. Well, what are you trying to be an OB or a psychiatrist? They were so confused. I said, you know, I don't know, Subhanallah, because we plan and I love plans and I love the best of planners. And now as I look back on it, Subhanallah, there really is kind of a divine wisdom in some of this. But I'll tell you, I entered into the field very suspicious of it. I wasn't planning on it, right? And I wasn't really sure because all I could really connect psychology to was Freud, like it didn't seem like any connection to us. And I had my Sharia training already. So everything that I looked at was from this lens of what did Islam have to say about this? What are the early Muslim scholars have to say about this? Is there a space for this? Because we would hear growing up early Muslims contributed to sciences, to medicine, to surgery, to the humanities. I heard nothing about mental health. I don't know if any of you guys did. Anybody? Anybody hear a connection of mental health? Even when they talk about the golden ages? Nothing. There was like no connection to that. Long story short, that led to some of the work that I was doing and kind of like pulling out the early primary texts, right? We'll call the Torah. Literally, our treasure trove of Islamic understanding of what the scholars wrote. And for me, it was very personal. It wasn't like I was planning to make this public. It was a very personal thing. Like, what did the scholars say? And in that process, subhanallah came across so much related to psychology and mental health. And it was very holistic. Like, it wasn't very limited the way you think of psychology or psychiatry today. And I think that's what was so special about it. And so I'll share a backstory, but then I think kind of opens the conversation to a lot of other things. Because for me, that was kind of a door that opened. And some of you may have heard this story. So forgive the repetition of it. But if you haven't heard it, it was it was such a milestone for me. I was going through some early texts, and we'd hear about famous Muslim physicians. Ibn Sina. Yeah. Arrazi. Yeah. Al-Balkhi. So you hear a Balkhi now, Alhamdulillah, because we started to actually talk about it. I'm so glad. Alhamdulillah. But it wasn't a known name. He wasn't a known entity because the reason Balkhi was famous, his name is Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi. And he's from the 9th century. And the reason he was famous at all was because he was famous for geography. He had an entire school of geography called the Balkhi in school of geography. And that's all we knew him for. There's a whole backstory of one of our mentors, Rahimahullah professor Malik Badri, if you ever hear of him, who found his book, Al-Balkhi's 9th century book, in the Aya Sofya's library, miscategorized, I guess, in a section that wasn't supposed to be there. Another professor had found it and gave it to him. And it had been there for hundreds of years, literally, like collecting dust. And nobody had known that Balkhi had written this manuscript. And the manuscript is about mind and body connection. That concept isn't a New Age concept. It turns out that that's something that early Muslims wrote a lot about, the connection between mind, body, and soul. And when they talk about mental health, they talk about it as that connection of all things together, not just physical, separate from mental, separate from spiritual. Does that make sense? So in Ben-Qi's writings, I was reading this in Arabic before some of it now has been translated by Professor Malik Badri. But in reading his books, his book, as a trained psychiatrist kind of going through training, I'm reading this and I'm going, this is depression. And then reading this next chapter, it's like, this is anxiety. And reading the next chapter and going, these are phobias. And then I got to a chapter that really blew my mind, like, you know, that little emoji that goes, like that. And it was obsessions. So the concept of West Swasa in Islam is that, and this is what Ben-Qi says, all humans have some level of West Swasa obsession. But then he says, some individuals will have more West Swasa than average. And that is a medical disorder. That's not just Shaitan, which all of us have some level of it. We say, Ar-Udub-Lahim-Nashir-Khan-Ar-Rajim, and you move on. But someone that has, what he describes as a pathological level of West Swasa, that needs medical treatment. And then he classifies it, diagnoses it, and then gives you all the symptoms. And I'm reading this going, what? Ninth century. The problem is in our classes of psychology and psychiatry, when they teach us the history of psychology, they say OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, which is, this was the closest thing to it. They say that's a new illness, a modern illness, that it wasn't discovered until the 19th century. That's what the book, every book of history, a history of psychology or history of medicine, that's what it says. And it will say that the Greeks and Romans may have mentioned a little bit on some obsession. And then they'll talk about this person in the 16th century who had like one case scenario described, but it wasn't really formalized until the 19th century. I won't bore you with history lesson, I promise. I'm just giving you this background, because when I came across this, I was like, what is this? Turns out that one of the preeminent scholars of OCD was at Stanford. The guy who wrote like the textbook on OCD was with us at Stanford. And his office was right down the hall from mine. So, walked over and said, hey, I think I found something. I think I found a reference to OCD a whole lot earlier than what we learned. And he said, no, no, no. And I said, no, no, really. And then he starts literally no, no joke. He starts pulling off papers off the shelf that he had written. And he goes, here's the one of the Romans. Here's one of the Greeks. Here's this and that. And he's like, no, no, no, there's nothing earlier than that. That's the way you're describing. And, you know, you want to be respectful to your professor, your elder. But at the same time, I just got kind of frustrated. So I said to him, can you read an Arabic? He was like, no. Can you? And I said, yeah. And he was like, he just paused for a little after he did all that hand weaving. And then he was kind of like, fine, go translate it and come back. Typical professor move, right? So I took up the challenge and actually translated that particular chapter of Van Ben Kree's book, presented it to him a couple weeks later, and showed him, because for me, I was like, amazed, but not only did he get the classification right, but all of the symptoms that he describes are actually the way a modern psychiatrist would describe and put all the symptoms in order, right? Today. And our book that we psychiatrists and psychologists diagnosed from is the DSM, the diagnostic statistical manual of psychiatry. And so I put Ben Kree's ninth century criteria and the DSM's criteria side by side. When he saw this, he started jumping, like legit, he started jumping. And I was like, oh, dear. And he was so excited, not for the fact that when I was excited for, well, the Muslims figure this out, right? That kind of excitement. Was as a scientist, right? That this is scientific. This kind of scientific discovery is going to rewrite the chapters and the books of history. So he was interested in the scientific merit of it. So I wasn't thinking about publishing. He said to me, this is God to get published. And I was like, where? And he said, mainstream medical journals. It needs to be in the mainstream, not published in some Muslim journal somewhere like, which is good, but I mean to say mainstream people have got to understand this. I was like, Hey, so we signed up to academic publishing, right to the journals. This first paper on Ben Kree, no city got accepted immediately, which almost never happens in academic publishing. There's a lot of peer review and so on and back and back and forth. This one got published immediately. So we're like, okay, let's write another one. We wrote one on Ben Kree and phobias. That one took forever. That's when you really see the academic, like there's pros and cons to academic writing. For those of you who are going into any sort of the world of academia, there's pros and cons, but you can see something really interesting here. They finally wrote back to me after like months and I thought for sure they're going to reject this paper. But when they wrote back, they said, what you're saying is so unorthodox. That's the word they used unorthodox. You're like pushing against all of the books of psychology, right? That we need to hire historians of medicine to verify your claims. I said, all right, go for it. So they took a few more months to do that. And when the reviews come back, and if you guys know about academic publishing, it's a double blinded peer review process. And so they don't know who I am. They don't know my institution. They just read the work itself and they judge it based on the merit. And when they wrote back, they said, this paper overturns the history of psychology. That's a bottle of alcohol. So we're sitting in our office going, but what was really exciting is that one of the reviewers, you know, well, the part that wasn't exciting, I'll tell you guys, is that he kept calling me a he. He thought I was like, oh, God, right? Because double blind, they don't know who I am. But at the same time, that's the bias of academia. But he actually says, see, I said he, could be she. Just a reverse bias. Anyhow, the reviewer said that this work actually overturns kind of the main historian of psychology. This guy's name is Barrios. And there are some people who literally just write the Muslims out of history, as in to say, you feel like it's accidental. Like they don't mean to let it know. They're like writing Greeks and Romans and jumping all the way to Freud for just the 19th century or 18th century. But there are some people that write about the Muslims and you feel like it's like purposeful, you know, kind of leaving us out. So Barrios says, yeah, the Muslims came around and translated the works of the Greeks, but they contributed nothing of their own. And that feels very heavy. But it also feels like the story that I would hear growing up that Muslims don't have any space in this like college world, right? But then it turned out, if you're going to have someone like Balchi figure out something like OCD so far away, so long ago. And then not only that, but if you think about what he does, he doesn't just classify and diagnosis it, he actually tells you the treatment. And that's what the reviewer was writing about. Can you imagine that Balchi in the 9th century figured out, he tells about three steps, and he says, this kind of condition needs medication. This is really important. We're going to come back to this, that some mental illnesses, some mental health conditions require medications. And that's still really hard for a lot of people in our communities. They're not ready to quite hear that. And they're like, just pray more, just have more Eman. But we don't have proof from our early scholars that that's what they said. Why? Because Balchi then goes on, and he says, number two, he says, a person that has this level of obsession actually needs to have talk therapy. Talk therapy? I won't say the Muslims create a talk therapy, okay? What I'll say, because I might have, what I'll say at least, is that they absolutely wrote about it. They developed it, and they pushed it, and they became very sophisticated in talk therapy. So much so when they read Balchi's description of his treatment of OCD, he comes up with a kind of talk therapy that we use today. Anybody know what the treatment for OCD is? What kind of CBT? ERP? What's ERP stand for? Exposure Response. Yeah, exactly. It's a type of exposure therapy. A gradual exposure therapy where little by little by little you work on the very things that you have an obsession about. Or infobia, same thing, little by little by little, the things that you have some fear about. The fact that he describes that and tells you how exactly to do this in the ninth century blew those historians and medicine out of the water. They were just like, what is this, right? Because it's so clear that he was able to not only fully understand this, but also how to treat it. But he didn't stop there, and this is where it's really important. The third step Balchi says is the spiritual part. So he quotes verses of the Qur'an and aspects from the hadith, where he tells the person who's afflicted by this that this isn't just shaytan. You've got to do more than just your earth, God and the good. But in the meantime, you've got to remember that a lot is there and is going to help you. Because whatever he sends you, he promises he's going to help you get through it. That three level, mind, body, soul is that holistic understanding of how Muslims understood and treated mental illness. That's our tradition. And I get really passionate about this because you could see it clearly in their writings. So that was exciting. But before I move from Balchi, I'll just tell you the funny story about the professor who inspired all this, inspired us to start, because it was actually those first publications that started my lab. The Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology lab that's at Stanford now. And I'm did that entering into about its 10th year next year. It was those early papers that kind of started the whole process. The professor's name is spelled K-O-R-A-N. We have Muslims have this concept of Thal Hassan, like good omens. You take a good one. So Dr. Puraan, not Muslim, I'll give him the daya. But it was really kind of inspirational. There's some important people who come along in the past who kind of see something for its merit and are able to kind of push it along. Do you know what I mean? So he was one of those people. And later, after publishing all about the people and the actual thinkers and the main people kind of in the field of what we would call, the field of Islamic psychology as we call it today, which is the, they talked about their psychology. There's not a perfect Arabic translation, but basically it's the study of your soul, the study of yourself, right, is how they conceptualized it. It's very interdisciplinary. So we wrote about the physicians that contributed and the theologians that contributed and the people of philosophers basically that contributed kind of that very holistic contributions to that field, because every single one of those disciplines contributed. And that sets it apart from modern psychology. But then eventually, after writing about people and their theories, you know, the question became, do they just write theories or do they actually treat people? And this is where the discussion that I'm currently working on, which is that theory went into institutions. They built actual institutions of healing. And those institutions were called the be modest stands. Who here knows what the word be modest? Who speaks Urdu or Farsi? Someone who's sick stand location. So it is the location, right? We're sick. We're a person who's sick goes to an Arabic, the version is called daughter she thought it's the place of healing, the place of she thought or healing. So it's the hospitals. So our research is showing and we're working on a book right now on the modest stands. Please make do out for it. We shortened the word from be modest and to modest and because that's the Latinized version of the word, the word that became commonly used in the literature, at least in the English language now. And so the be modest stands or modest stands to our history to our research are the first hospitals in human history that had psychiatric awards in the hospital. When you compare when he started in the eighth century to what was happening before the civilizations before them, the Greeks, the Romans, Indian civilizations, Chinese civilizations, you don't find that their hospitals had mental health treatment in them. When you compare to Europe across the way, same time period, you find that the mentally ill are very poorly treated. They're either being burned like witches at the stake in this era, or they're sent to the people of religion, to the priests and the nuns, like convalescence homes where they're just sort of, you know, praying on them and praying for them and helping them. But there's no actual medical treatment. It's not understood as a medical illness. So why is that important? Because in the Islamic tradition, you don't actually find proof that the people who had mental illness or mental health conditions were sent to the shoe. That's not our tradition. That's not our tradition. People who had a mental illness were sent to the hospitals. And their rewards and sections, just like there was for surgery and obstetrics and internal medicine and eye diseases, there was psychiatric mental health treatment. Did you know that? Do you have any idea of this history? I had no idea of this history. I'll just finish my thought. Let's start to take questions. No worries. Just when you think about that, not only should it make you proud as a Muslim, but you also have to understand and ask yourself, how did the Muslims come across this and do this when no other civilizations before them had done it? That's when you start to understand that the impetus, the push for this is actually directly from the Qur'an and the Sunnah. That's really important to understand that connection. So when you read the writings of Ibn Sina and Razi and so on, what you find is they're quoting specific verses of the Qur'an and specific hadith that are inspiring them to do this work in psychology. Probably the most common hadith that comes up over and over in the writings of the scholars is a hadith in which the Sahaba are asking the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, if we get ill, if we fall ill, should we get treatment? As in to say, is it enough to just pray? And the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam says, yes, go get help. The wording in Arabic is seek out treatments, oh servants of God. If you get ill, seek out treatments. Shifa.