Tomb of Salim Chishti, Fatehpur Sikri, India
As a Muslim physician, I face a strange conundrum. On the one hand, I am proud to be part of the discipline of modern medicine, which has led to miraculous breakthroughs that have advanced the way we understand the body and treat its various diseases. On the other hand, I am restrained in my admiration, for I realize that this very discipline, due to its unshakeable commitment to a mechanical philosophy of nature, has obscured our view of the qualitative and spiritual meanings of the human body. Modern medicine, like a Promethean fire, gives light but also burns. While it may shed light on the complex workings of our body, it blinds us from seeing the deeper spiritual message that is woven into our flesh and sinews and flows through our arteries and veins.
Many Muslim scholars acknowledge that there are ethical challenges that stem from modern medicine and its technologies, but very few consider the metaphysical concerns that arise from its mechanistic view of the human body. In fact, despite the growing number of Muslim physicians around the world, very few see any issue at all with the current scientific understanding of the human body.
I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth.
— Rene Descartes1
As someone who has recently passed through the hoops and hurdles of becoming a physician, I can say for certain that the mechanical conception of nature continues to pervade all aspects of medical theory and practice. From day one in anatomy class to the final years of preparing for board exams, we as physicians are acculturated to speak in the language of mechanism and understand the body as a complex amalgamation of parts and sub-parts, almost identical to a complex machine. The mechanistic paradigm clothes our understanding of the body in the language of industry. It slowly begins to creep into our consciousness during medical school and eventually takes firm root as we graduate, when as qualified physicians, we speak of the body as if it were in fact, as Descartes once dreamed, an earthly machine. A look at any modern medical textbook will corroborate this finding. For instance, it is common to read in introductory biology books that the cells of our body are like “factories” with “machinery” that can transcribe and translate DNA, like parts of an assembly line, until a specific protein is produced. Likewise, in human physiology textbooks, our endocrine organs are likened to advanced thermostats with feedback loops, the lungs are bellows, and the heart is a pump.
This mechanistic paradigm is closely linked to what Rene Guénon refers to as the “quantitative point of view,”2 which has dominated Western society for centuries and is characterized by a strong commitment to regard natural phenomena as mere instantiations of mathematical laws. Thus, when it comes to understanding the biological processes—such as respiration, digestion, and circulation—that sustain our life, we are taught as physicians to focus on those mathematical formulae (i.e., Boyle’s law, Starling’s law, Ohm’s law, etc...) that model these phenomena rather than to appreciate them for their rich qualitative, symbolic, and spiritual meanings.
However advantageous our current mode of thinking is in advancing scientific discovery, it neglects the deeper meaning of the human body, which, from the Islamic perspective, is a work of art and a locus of spiritual meaning that cannot be fully accounted for by the mere analysis of its quantifiable parts. Our current scientific understanding of the body provides a partial understanding—albeit extremely detailed—akin to an image generated by a digital camera. This understanding, despite its “high resolution” and clarity, remains subject to the deficiency caused by its own sophistication, for as the camera fails to capture the breadth of meaning embedded in the actual object, modern medicine, with its mechanistic aperture, overlooks the deeper qualitative meaning of the human body.
Figure 1
The commitment to this reductionist worldview also leads to an undervaluation of sickness and its reduction to mere disease. Instead of appreciating sickness as a reality based on both quantitative (disease) and qualitative (illness) aspects, modern medicine often overlooks the shadow of illness and focuses its spotlight only on the disease. One can sum up the effects of the mechanistic worldview on our understanding of the human body in Figure 1. In this figure, we see how mechanism reduces our understanding of the human body and sickness to its quantifiable parts (blue circle) and fails to consider the wider zones of meaning that encompass this dimension (pink circle).
On the intellectual level, what we need to do is to be brave enough to show the shortcomings of modern science and try to provide another intellectual and spiritual framework for understanding that science.
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr 3
The desire to pay attention to the qualitative features of nature and apprehend its deeper symbolic and spiritual meanings was a zeal that began early in my medical education. It was a passion ignited through my reading of the Qur’an, the writings of contemporary Muslim thinkers,4 and the inspired poetry of Rumi and Iqbal. This passion soon became a conviction, and as I progressed through my medical training, I slowly began to realize that the various physiological processes and diseases we study as physicians cannot be overlooked as complex workings and mishaps of mere mechanical parts. Rather, human physiology, like all natural phenomena, is a sign of God (āyah) akin to scripture and needs to be interpreted in both a literal and a symbolic sense. To truly study the human body, therefore, as a committed Muslim physician, I realized we need a dramatic shift in perspective. We must see the body not only through the microscope and the lens of mathematical formulae but also through our spiritual insight (baśīrah), which can peer into the inward meaning of things.
When we set aside the lens of the mechanistic worldview and open our “inward eye,” we begin to see the human body as a spiritual theophany (tajallī) rather than a complex earthly machine. The organs of our bodies and our physiological processes reveal themselves as more than impersonal instantiations of “laws of nature,” for they are existential symbols that teach us about our journey from God and return back to Him.
When we move beyond mechanism, the cell is no longer a factory processing the code of DNA into various proteins but a symbol of how “divine writ” (kalām Allāh) is transcribed, translated, and concretized in specific formulations in the universe. The lungs are more than bellows moving air in and out of the body; they are a symbol of the soul, which expands and contracts with the coming and going of divine inspiration (nafas al-raĥmān). Likewise, the heart and the blood circulating through its network of arteries and veins represent the spiritual center (qiblah) and the pilgrims who travel to and from this center in order to transmit and receive the blessing of God (barakah).
This move away from mechanism is not a move toward obscurantism and fanciful poetry. It does not mean we should ignore the truths discovered by modern science, but rather it is a call toward a broader paradigm—rooted in the Qur’an—that allows us to take seriously the qualitative, symbolic, and spiritual meanings embedded in nature.
