Special Section: Spirituality/Medicine Interface Project Miraculous Medical Recoveries and the Islamic Tradition

As an extension of a concept known as tawheed,* nothing lies outside of The Jurisdiction of Divine Intervention; nor is God the deist’s watchmaker, winding up reality and watching various Newtonian-like mechanized processes play themselves out. Once this latter deist notion is embraced, and given a particular subtle type of human propensity for self-exaltation (a type which is by definition not within the secular humanist’s recognition but wellknown to the world’s yedic and abrahamic faith traditions), it is only a matter of time before God is cast out of the ontological picture and these alleged processes are themselves seen as absolute and self-existent–they themselves become all powerful “deities” which some day will be clearly elucidated. The Qur’an, as an entity not derived of human intellect or some other human machination, but as Divine Disclosure about God and reality itself, informs humanity that God is both imminent and transcendent. As an extension of this, God possesses attributes of enveloping intimacy and utterly remote majesty, attributes which are purely abstract as well as anthropomorphic, and attributes that include both compassion and rigor. The manifestation of attributes of The Near, The Present, The Creator, The Sustainer, The Annihilator, and The Sovereign—an ontological view known in modern parlance as occasionalism, dominates the Islamic worldview. It posits that reality as we know it is a discontinuous series of creations and annihilations, and the fluidity in which we experience cause and effect are not absolute. Hence, God as Sustainer maintains all of reality at every instant. Although most laity (and so called “educated moderns”) are not explicitly aware of this doctrinal exposition, its logical extensions are intuitively recognized by every traditional Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Parsi, and Hindu. That is–there is nothing absolute about our understanding of cause and effect. Causality itself is a phenomenon, under the command (Amr) of Allah. The traditional Muslim understands that all causality in the spatiotemporal realm is continuously contingent upon and effectuated through what we may call Divine Permission (be idhnillah). This ontological point assumes that the mundane and material is immersed in The Sacred. Hence when fire burns, it burns not only through a phenomenon which we call combustion, but combustion itself is at the command of God. Hence, combustion was delinked from its exothermism in the Qur’anic account when Abraham was plunged into the fire. The Qur’an states God commanded the fire to cool for Abraham–and the idolaters attempt at torturing him was foiled. As a child, I remember drinking the medicine given to me by my mother who is an accomplished and celebrated modern allopathic physician–Allahu-Shaafee, Allahu-Kaafi she would whisper as I gulped down the bittersweet antidiarrheal. “God is the Intercessor [through which healing occurs], God Suffices” is the nearest English translation of this incantation. Although some of the chemical and physiologic pathways that are distal to the healing process have been elucidated, these mechanisms work ‘be idhnillah,’ or with the permission of God. These pathways, be they in the realm of physics or chemistry, are observed by the human empirical faculty as part of usual experience, and it is this which human ingenuity relies upon, takes advantage of, and manipulates for goal-directed outcomes. That penicillin is thermodynamically driven into the bacterial cell wall is a mercy from God, and itself one of the ayaat-ullah (signs or symbols of God); that acardiac glycoside or catecholamine analog compels the heart to increase its output is also a mercy and ayat-ullah–such things are ayaat-ullah for those who reflect with humility and sincerity. From the Nassau University Medical Center, Department of Emergency Medicine, East Meadow, NY.