Raising children in the West







أَرَأَيْتَ مَنِ اتَّخَذَ إِلَهَهُ هَوَاهُ أَفَأَنتَ تَكُونُ عَلَيْهِ وَكِيلًا








What are the challenges of raising a child in the West?






إِنَّنِي أَنَا اللَّهُ لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا أَنَا فَاعْبُدْنِي وَأَقِمِ الصَّلَاةَ لِذِكْرِي










كُنتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ تَأْمُرُونَ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَتَنْهَوْنَ عَنِ الْمُنكَرِ وَتُؤْمِنُونَ بِاللّهِ





Two mysteries – Teaching and Parenting

Two mysteries – Teaching and Parenting

Our present methods of teaching which are inflicted on by far the vast majority of children the world over are the single biggest cause for killing the imagination that every child is born with and making them into square blocks which fit our own frightened, constrained and slavish worldview. Those who comply we ‘pass’ and those who challenge it and refuse to succumb, we ‘fail’. The occasional among those we ‘fail’, go on to great fortune. The majority disappear, never to be heard from again. Destroyed by the education system they didn’t deserve or ask for.

If I were asked to define the biggest challenge of the teacher, I would say, ‘It is to teach children how to deal with a world that we know nothing about.’ In such a world, imagination is the key resource that they will need. Without imagination they would be floundering trying to find answers in history or ‘facts’ that they had been taught. But they would never find those answers because they simply aren’t there. Yet the thing that most schools do with amazing efficiency is to kill the child’s imagination as quickly as possible. And sadly, they are very successful in doing so.

Teaching is not about answering questions but about raising questions – opening doors for them in places that they could not imagine. Teaching is about teaching them the tools of learning which will enable them to pursue learning all their lives. Not answer questions – end all discussion and pass exams. That is the reason why most children never open a science book once they finish with school. That is the reason why there is a serious global shortage of scientists. Even when we teach what we know – the answers – we need to teach them how we arrived at those answers and then ask them, ‘If you faced this issue, what questions would you ask to find an answer.’ We need to focus far more on derivation, problem solving methodology and analytical skills than on actually arriving at some formula or solution.

The biggest problem with teachers is that they teach. That is the root cause of all ignorance. Teachers must stop ‘teaching’ and instead, start discovering, learning, enjoying. Start appreciating that the child is the best thing that happened to you and every single day try to become the best thing that happens to him or her. Teachers must be like ushers in a vast museum, walking quietly with their students tiptoeing behind them, opening one door after another – letting them take a peek – and then handing them the key to the door so that they can come back in their own time and explore in detail. The teacher then takes them to another door for another peek and another key. See?? Imagine how exciting that is for the child!  The teacher’s job is to give them the keys. Teaching is about keeping the excitement of learning alive all lifelong.

In all the years that I have spoken to parents all over the world, I have often asked them one question: ‘Please think of your most powerful role model. For how many of you is it a parent?’ I have never had more than five percent of the population put up their hands. That means that for ninety-five percent of people, their parents – the two people who invested the most in their upbringing – are not their role models; a real tragedy, though a self-inflicted one. I believe that parenting is a serious job, one which must be undertaken consciously; clearly understanding what it entails. Children have a right to have good parents who can be role models for them and who can not only teach them the tools to succeed in this life, but also to take from the treasures of Allah and succeed in the life to come.
Please remember that whether you like it or not, you are a role model for your children. Your choice is to decide what kind of role model you want to be – one that they can look up to or one that they must to look down on. Children listen with their eyes. They don’t care what you say until they see what you do. Anyone who has children has no such thing as a private life. Whatever you do is under the spotlight, will be noticed, learnt, and emulated. If there is any gap between the talk and the walk your credibility with your children will fall through it. Allah sent you to guide your children and the enormity of this responsibility is the reason for the honorable status that Islam gives to parents. Parents who behave dishonorably before their children are the worst of humanity – abysmal, abominable, and disgusting.
Islam recognizes the nuclear family as the basic building block of society and so Allahmentioned parents over a dozen times in the Qur’an and honored them and enjoined upon children that they must respect, obey and treat them with kindness when they are old.  However, all this is based on the responsibility that He sent parents with. The honor is a result of fulfilling that responsibility. A big misconception that Muslim parents have is that their responsibility is like that of any other parent; feed them, clothe them, shelter them, send them to a good (usually meaning expensive) school and safeguard their future by investing for them if they have the funds to do so – and that’s it. Well, it isn’t.

Parenting requires the parents to develop themselves to a level where they become the inspiration in the lives of their children. It requires us to face the fact that ignorant parents can only produce ignorant children. Parents who have no books in the house will not have children addicted to reading. Parents whose conversation centers around the lives of other people can’t have children who speak about great ideas and dream of changing the world. Parents whose major life decisions are which dress to wear or which handbag to carry, can’t guide children who are struggling with existential questions relating to their purpose in life. Parents need to wake up and face the fact that their problems related to raising children are really a reflection of how little they have invested in themselves. Paupers can hardly be expected to help others. The time to change is now and it is never too late.
Where are we headed?

Where are we headed?

You may have seen the famous documentary, Four Horsemen.
In this film is this quote:
I ask myself why it is that we have written history to eulogize and applaud every rapacious bandit? Why is Alexander of Macedonia called, “The Great”? And a host of other bandits from every part of the world, whose only contribution was mass destruction, enslavement of innocent people and looting the resources of their countries. The British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and German Empires did their best to outdo each other in this race. Now the Americans are trying to beat the rest. I can’t be bothered to name all the others who I have missed not because of forgetfulness but out of contempt for this whole line of thinking and living.
As long as we continue to glorify war and plunder, we will continue to be plundered. 

That is the paradigm and conversation that we must change.
I am not for getting too stuck in our own theories and start treating them like fundamental laws. They are not. They are theories; our attempts to make sense of our world. All power to those who postulate them and reflect on them. But they are theories. The world, the earth, is not something we understand completely – to put it mildly – for I believe we don’t understand it at all. Comparing the human race to rats or bacteria in a petri dish, only goes so far. These are not absolute conclusions to be applied to ourselves.
In any case, even if they are, we have two choices: Lie down and die, or work like hell to change the conclusions. I opt for the latter. I would rather go out on my feet fighting for a better world.
That is why I say to myself, ‘I will not allow what is not in my control to prevent me from doing what is in my control.’
Controlling world population is not in my control. But to reduce my own carbon footprint, to share my resources, to help others and many other things are very much in my control. So, I try to do all those.
As for the articles on population control, I have read similar ones for at least over 30 years that predicted the end of the earth at lower population levels (less than 8 billion). But we are still there. Also, all these are eventually talking about reducing the population in some remote land where the people are very different from myself. It is the concept of the ‘Other’, that makes it easy to conceptualize what are essentially culls of the ‘Other’. Easy to do because they are not like, ‘Us”. Shades of smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans?
We enable ourselves into this highly homicidal way of thinking because we think within the artificial and false boundaries of our nation states; lines on maps of our own making. We forget that the earth is not like this. Africa is not different from America or Asia because we decide to draw a line or because there is a ditch which we call the Atlantic between it and America. The earth is connected. It is ONE. Whether we like to accept that or not. What happens to one will happen to all of us, whether we like it or not. Ref: Butterfly effect.
The only way therefore that we can ‘save ourselves’, is by saving others. Not by culling them. Call it what you want but that is the conclusion that all these theories of ‘population control’ are leading to. It is this thinking – I don’t need to change, but the population needs to be reduced – that produces our Eternal War philosophy. Military Industrial States need war to survive and grow. They need to build weapons, places to use them with impunity and guess what, the reward is two separate lines of revenue; weapons sales and picking up the pieces later in the form of mines, oil, loot, slaves and land.

Who does all that go to? The 1%. Those same 62. At whose cost? All the poor dumb bastards who thought they were fighting for honour, to save their glorious lands from the marauding hordes of barbarians who don’t know the taste of a Big Mac or Pepsi. Okay, Coke. Same difference. It takes two to tango. In this case, the spin doctors who write the script to suit the 1% and the dumb, unwashed multitude who believes this complete crap and are willing to lay down their lives so that the 62 are not deprived of a single fish egg of their caviar. As long as there are those who are willing to be exploited, the exploiters will have a field day. That is why I say that it is high time we – the 99% – wake up. At least die with your eyes wide open. 
I am of the belief that we need to change our lifestyles, which will stem from changing our values and rejecting the capitalistic, global domination model that we have been raised to believe. We must reject, greed and demonstrate that by ending our endless collection of garbage in the name of shopping, our addiction to self-aggrandisement and appeasing desires, our enslavement to accumulation of personal wealth at all cost and our world view which places us at the centre with everyone and everything else subordinate and subservient to ourselves. All of this is eminently possible with the right education starting in primary schools.
After all, if someone had told us to create a system where 62 people would have more wealth than the bottom 50% of global population, we would have laughed them out of the room. But that is exactly what we have accomplished and that too so subtly and quietly that I bet not one of us even realised it was happening. But believe me, we did it. We legitimized lying with full eye contact (recall George Bush and Colin Powell and Iraq’s unfindable Weapons of Mass Destruction), legitimized treating others like flies or mosquitoes, to be exterminated (recall Madelaine Albright’s comment on ABC: that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was ‘worth it’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE) and legitimized hypocrisy at levels perhaps never before seen. Come on people, wake up! Everything has an effect.
I say that because if we did this, we can undo it. We must undo it. It can’t last. It is a criminal, grossly unjust and utterly criminal way of life.
And finally, as I said earlier, we don’t even begin to understand the earth. The earth will correct itself. It will get rid of the cancer that is polluting it. It has seen many cycles of catastrophic (for its inhabitants, not for the earth itself) changes that completely altered the composition of those who live on it. And it can and will do it again.
So, let us get ready to change. Or get ready to be changed.

Give a dog a bad name…

Give a dog a bad name…

I want to begin with a brief thumbnail view of global geopolitics since the collapse of the Soviet Union under President Gorbachev. This was an event that was widely applauded and rejoiced, including by Muslims worldwide. Little did they realize what it would lead to. For a military state, an economy based on war, an enemy is essential. When the Soviet Union decided to call it a day with playing sparring partner, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) needed someone else to justify its existence and to continue to make money for those who run it. It is important to understand that the political entities we call nation states are incidental in this scheme of things. The people who run the show are not bound by any nationality. They are truly global in that they operate from anywhere and across all national boundaries. Laws that bind us and monitor our transactions don’t bind these people. This world is run by a handful of men, not countries and politicians. That is why I am not naming any country; not because of any reticence to do so.

In their search; or I should say; as per their plan, they chose Global Islam (GI). I am coining that phrase to differentiate it from Islam as a religion. The religion of Islam is of no interest to MIC. What is of interest is the ability to take GI and project it in the space of the ‘Other’, which is critical to continued success even survival of the MIC. GI was ideal because it satisfied all the criteria necessary for an effective ‘Other’, which are:

1.      Mysterious:
a.     So that all kinds of lies can be attributed to it with impunity
2.     Different:
a.     ‘They’ are not white, not European/American, not Christian
3.     History:
a.     Bad memories of having been defeated by ‘them’ in the Crusades as well as ‘they’ having been the only opponent worthy of the name to European royalty and the Church for centuries
4.     Ineffective globally:
a.     I don’t think this even needs an explanation
5.     Compliant internal leadership:
a.     Well, since they were placed there by MIC and remain on their seats at MIC’s pleasure, what choice do they have?
6.     Immunity:
a.     If they are attacked, killed, countries destroyed, it is no skin off our nose
7.     Nebulous:
a.     No specific state for one to be accused of aggression. A nebulous cloud called by whatever name seems fit, Axis of Evil, Islamic Terror etc. So, attacking it is easy and no single or group of states can protest in the UN.
8.     Polarization:
a.     Is easy for all the reasons above and language was invented to legitimize invasion, murder and plunder.
9.     Internal conflict:
a.     They are divided amongst themselves and prone to being instigated against one another, so very susceptible to manipulation.
In the words of Fredrick Bastiat, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That is precisely what is happening today in the world and the Muslims are caught in the middle in the proverbial place between a rock and a hard place. There is an old adage, ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him.’ It means that the poor dog didn’t do anything to be hanged but was the victim of a media campaign against him. Dogophobia got him and he was hanged. That is what those who spend their time and money behind demonizing Islam seem to want to do. Islamophobia is a multibillion dollar industry which like the pre-World War II, anti-Semitism of Germany and Europe is run by those who are trying to make hay while the sun shines.   
That is how the deaths of over a million civilians (plus half a million children under the age of ten) in the Iraq war is brushed aside, even though the entire war was based on lies. The massacre of civilians in Bosnia is a post script, the occupation of Palestine and the daily atrocities being heaped on the heads of an imprisoned population are acceptable and the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people is not worthy of mention. These and many other instances of mass murder, carried out by the MIC military directly or their proxies, which I have not bothered to mention as my point is made, have only one thing in common; i.e. the victims are all Muslim. The mainstream media is the thought steering tool for the great unwashed and ignorant multitude which gets its knowledge exclusively from the TV screen. They are brainwashed to believe that when a Muslim (or many Muslims) dies, he had it coming. But if he fights back, he is an insurgent, terrorist and embodiment of evil.
They don’t have the intelligence to ask how a man fighting an occupying army for the right to live in his own home can be an insurgent? This is like the British judge, sitting in judgment on the last Moghul Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who had no answer when the King asked him by what right he was being judged by a foreign occupier in his own land. But when you are on the right end of a gun and the other on its wrong end, you can get away with anything, so Bahadur Shah Zafar was banished from his own land and his sons and grandsons were executed. Why? Because they were his sons and grandsons and the British believed in tying all loose ends. Same logic in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and through proxies in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and many other places today. The same logic drove Vietnam and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese at the hands of invaders, French and American.
I wonder how many Americans know the meaning of the term ‘Double Veteran’.

Rape of Vietnamese women by US troops “took place on such a large scale that many veterans considered it standard operating procedure.”  It was “systematic and collective”; an “unofficial military policy”.  One soldier termed it a “mass military policy.”  Indeed, rape followed by murder of Vietnamese women was “so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran”. Legitimizing of atrocity is a natural result of the process of dehumanizing the ‘other’ and believing that they are ‘vermin’ to ‘exterminate’ whom is the noble duty of the ‘brave and virtuous’.
In support of my contention I quote an article about the Jewish Holocaust which captures the entire process very well. It is a matter of wonder to this day, how the people of Germany not only watched in silence as 6 million Jewish and other people were systematically murdered, but helped in the process by constructing gas chambers, transportation systems and all manner of horrific methodologies which I will leave you to read about on your own.
I never tire of quoting Pastor Niemöller’s words about this, which exhort us to stand up before it is too late. Today the world is once again sitting in silence while the MIC juggernaut rolls on; not asking key questions that must be asked, not taking powerful stances for justice, imagining that by doing so, they are saving themselves.
As Pastor Niemöller says, that is what the Germans also thought, until at the end of the war, they contemplated their own devastated cities, lives and homes. Payment always comes.
Martin Niemöller
(14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984)

This narrative of the ‘Other’ has today, legitimized any kind of atrocity as long as it is done to Muslims and has made hatred of Muslims acceptable everywhere. Just like it had legitimized every atrocity against the Jews in the last century and the Vietnamese (communists) in the 60’s and 70’s. It is necessary to see the signs and recognize them for what they are and not allow ourselves to be fooled by these age-old games.
That is why in India when a twelve-year-old Muslim boy is stabbed multiple times and killed in a train before his own younger brother, the entire carriage load of people looked on and cheer the murderers. Ask them what the crime of the boy was. Ask them if the boy had harmed them. Ask them why they did nothing. All these questions have only one answer; he was a Muslim. And so, all these things become legitimate and acceptable. In Myanmar, the Rohingya people are being systematically slaughtered, raped and burned alive by the Burmese army and the world watches in silence.
In India once again, in a gathering of upper class, educated people one man, on the topic of the Rohingya genocide, says that what is happening is acceptable and should happen. ‘Muslims need to be killed’, he says. Nobody protests. Nobody is shocked. Nobody is outraged. One person, not a Muslim, raises a voice protesting, asking if one should not be compassionate; asking if murder is not a crime, no matter who does it. No to all of the above because they are “MUSLIM”. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you understand this simple fact? I can quote many more examples but I think this is enough. After all we all read the same papers and watch the same channels.
As you can see the narrative needs to be changed. But since that is linked to the well-being of the MIC, how can we, garden variety common people, do it? I am going to attempt to put down my thoughts about what I believe needs to be done for three reasons:
 1.      I will not allow what is not in my control to prevent me from doing what is in my control. I can’t influence the global narrative (or at least I don’t know how to do it at this point) but I can influence the local one, so I am going to try that and share my thoughts with you.
2.     No matter what the spin doctors want us to believe, the rule of the MIC can only result in more and more misery for common people, less and less safety and security for us and more and more hatred in society, all in order to make the 1% ever wealthier.
3.     No matter how powerful the Dons of the MIC think they are, ultimately their power depends on those who follow them. Without the unquestioning obedience of their followers, they are powerless. That is the reason we must ask questions; uncomfortable questions. Be it about climate change or about global dominance. That is why they spend a colossal fortune on mind steering through the media, films, social media and other means of communication. If George Bush and his gang were really powerful they would have been able to invade Iraq without telling a barrage of lies to the UN and the whole world, first. And if those who listened to the lies had asked the right questions, two million people would have lived. It is as important as that, to ask the right questions at the right time.

Please see my article for more on the need to accept our autonomy and understand that ultimately each one of us is personally accountable. The reality is that unless we decide to believe the false narrative and fall into its trap, nobody can force us into it.

A couple of questions that you may like to ask, even today:

1.      When Saudi Arabia is being held complicit enough in the 9/11 bombing incident for the US Congress to pass the 9/11 Lawsuit Bill, permitting victims to file suits against them, why did President Donald Trump sign an agreement to supply them with $110 billion worth of arms?

2.     If ISIS is really so bad, then how is it that despite the overwhelming presence of the US and Allied forces in that theatre, ISIS continues to have an uninterrupted supply of weapons and ordnance, fuel and supplies and cash funds? After all, if you tried to transfer $10,000 to Iraq or Syria, you would have everyone from the IRS to FBI to your neighbor’s dog, breathing down your neck. But there appears to be no problem with billions of dollars being freely transferred and payments for arms and ammunition being credited when it comes to the ISIS. So, who is the enemy and who is the friend?

I am sure you have all read the famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” an 1854 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War and its very famous line: “Ours is not to question why, ours is to do and die.” This is the philosophy that keeps hatred of the ‘Other’ alive, enables genocide, sacrifices the poor and empowers the 1% to remain secure and become wealthier. 

Imagine a world where the soldier questions why he is being ordered to kill innocent people. Imagine a world where the person manufacturing weapons of mass destruction questions what value he is adding to society by working in such a place and what legacy he is leaving behind for his family. Imagine a world where people manufacturing cigarettes and alcohol see films on lung cancer and alcohol related car crashes and then make a choice whether to go to work or not. I can imagine more scenarios but will instead leave you to do this on your own. Sit with your children and make a game of it. Imagine a world without war. Imagine a world without the 1% but instead with their wealth shared by those who share the dream of global prosperity. Not global dominance by military might. Wars happen for one reason only and that is because they make profit. Take that away and you would have taken away the reason for war. That is the road to peace. Not attempting to silence all opposition to the dominance of the 1%.

If you are ready to sacrifice your life and happiness to put more caviar and champagne on the tables of the 1%, go ahead but count me out. I want a world where my family, friends and I are safe, can live peacefully together, earn a decent living and leave behind a legacy for the next generation. If you don’t like this idea, then you should stop reading this right away. We don’t live in little compartments in this world. We live in a world connected in far more powerful and meaningful ways than social media. This doesn’t simply mean that we can go from place to place faster or communicate across great distances instantaneously but that what happens to one, affects everyone. 

The Butterfly Effect of Chaos Theory is not restricted to weather. It affects us in all aspects of life. Those who refuse to recognize it and insist on living as if they live alone in the world, will become its victims.

It’s time for all butterflies to start flapping their wings to create a hurricane of world opinion that will drive out all injustice and oppression, no matter where it may be. 

Medical Ethics? Who is she?

Of late we have been having an interesting and involved discussion on the subject of medical ethics in India, especially in so-called corporate hospitals involving also doctors in both private practice and government service. Interesting and involved because everyone is an interested party; at some time having been the recipients of the tender mercies of doctors and our hospital system. What I have been left with at the end of it all is the distinctly alarming feeling that the entire concept of medical ethics seems to be Greek and Latin to most doctors – or at least that is how they seem to act. So I thought it would be a useful exercise to put this down on paper, the way I see it so that we can take it on from there.

There are five players in this game – the game of medical care in India. They are:

1.    Corporate Hospital
2.    Diagnostic Center
3.    Pharmaceutical company – represented by its salesmen
4.    Individual doctors – independent & employees of corporate hospitals
5.    Patients

It is symbolic that the name given to the sufferer of a disease is ‘patient’. Perhaps it is a reminder to him of what he needs to be above all else – patient in the face of not only suffering which would be a trial enough, but even more patient in the face of open exploitation by those who he trusts, needs desperately and looks up to as his saviors. The problem is that of a lack of sync in perception. Those who he looks to as his saviors see him as their victim or prey to be used and abused until he can give no more. Exploitation by anyone is bad. But exploitation by those who are trusted is blasphemous and evil. Exploitation by doctors, hospitals and medical service providers falls squarely in that category. Let those who indulge in it fear the Day when they will meet their Creator and have to answer Him for what they did. It doesn’t matter whether you believe this or not. It will happen just the same. Just as not believing in cholesterol will not save you from a heart attack; not believing in AllahY and the Day of Judgment will not save you from it. If you don’t believe me, just wait a bit.

So what is evil about the system as it exists?

What is evil is simply the issue of breach of trust. The trust between the doctor and his patient. There are many relationships in our lives which are based on trust. Parent/child, teacher/student, husband/wife, employer/employee, lawyer/client and others. However it can perhaps be argued that the most intimate of these is that of doctor/patient, where the doctor has access to such intimate personal details of the patient that almost none of the above relations have.

A relationship that is based on trust is unique in that between the two parties there are no barriers, defenses or filters. So any hostile act goes straight to the heart without any hope of being either diverted or combatted. Add to this the complexity that in the doctor/patient relationship the trust is completely one-sided. The doctor knows everything about the patient and can learn whatever he wants simply by asking while the patient may not even know the doctor’s full name, let alone anything more about him. After all in which of these relationships can one simply order the other to drop his pants with the full assurance that his order will be obeyed without question?

Therefore when that relationship is abused the crime is compounded in it heinousness because it amounts to predatory behavior. Given that the medical profession is perhaps the only one where those who graduate as doctors actually take an oath to keep the patient as their first and only concern and to practice their profession with honor and with the sole aim of helping the patient in his hour of need; when those doctors instead start to treat the patient as prey and instead of helping him, proceed to abuse the trust to loot him; the crime becomes worse than that of highway robbery.

The situation as it exists today is as follows:

1.    Most Corporate hospitals give doctors commercial targets that they are supposed to achieve every month. If they don’t do it, whatever be the reason, they are penalized directly or indirectly.
2.    In order to achieve these targets doctors have only one way; prescribe unnecessary investigations, treatments, hospitalization, surgical procedures, ICU care and expensive medication when cheaper alternatives may be available.
3.    Diagnostic centers give doctors commissions which are a percentage of the billing they do for patients that those doctors send to them. This has been made such a fine art that even if a doctor doesn’t send patients to a particular diagnostic center, once a few patients come to them from that doctor, they automatically send a payment to that doctor.
4.    And pharmaceutical companies give doctors bribes (they call them incentives or commissions) in the form of cash and kind – holidays, eating out, gifts etc.

The person who eventually pays for all these is of course the patient as he is the only one in this racket who pays. All others collect at his expense. The patient pays directly in terms of needlessly high cost of treatment because all the incentives to doctors are passed on to him. Or indirectly through cost of medical insurance for the same reason.

The questions I want to ask the readers who are doctors are:

1.    Did you take all the pains to study medicine, qualify in tough exams and work all hours and take an oath at the end of it; to alleviate suffering or to inflict it?
2.    How is it that you don’t feel insulted when you are given commercial targets and when you are offered incentives and commissions?
3.    Are you a doctor or are you a you-know-what (let me know if you need me to explain what that is)?

Let me tell you what Rasoolullahr said about commissions andincentives:

1.    Abdullah bin `Amrynarrated that Rasoolullahr said: “The curse of AllahY is upon the one who offers a bribe and the one who takes it.”
(Ahmad, Ibn Majah and authenticated by Al-Albani) 
2.    Abu Sa`id Al-Khudriynarrated that Rasoolullahr said: “Whosoever amongst you sees an evil, let him change it with his hands; and if he is not able, then with his tongue; and if he is not able, then let him hate it in his heart, and that is the weakest of faith.” (Authenticated by Al-Albani)
3.    Abu Humaid As-sa’idiyreported that Rasoolullahrsaid: “Gifts offered to public servants are ill-gotten gains (ghulul).” (Authenticated by Al-Albani)
4.    Buraidah ibn Al-Husaibynarrated that Rasoolullahrsaid: “When we appoint someone to a (public) post and provide him with an allowance, anything he takes beyond that is an ill-gotten gain.” (Abu Dawud and authenticated by Al-Albani)
5.    Khaulah bint `Amir (RA) reported that Rasoolulahr said: “Some men abuse AllahY‘s Property (that is, public money and funds). They will go to Hell on the Day of Resurrection.” (Bukhari)
It is clear from all of the above – if you need proof for what your heart should have told you without any of this – that having anyone other than the patient as your primary client whose welfare must supercede every other consideration amounts to breach of trust of the worst kind. Taking all commissions, prescribing unnecessary treatments, making money from the patient beyond a reasonable fee, amounts to ill-gotten gains which attracts the punishment of AllahY.
I didn’t want to make this too long and so I recorded a video about this in which I have told my own story of how I was exploited and how my father was exploited by big name corporate hospitals. Sadly my story is not unique. Stories like mine and far worse abound and every day we hear a new story of gross medical malpractice which is aided and abetted by destroying all evidence of it, doctors lying about it and ensuring that no legal action can be taken against the perpetrators – hospitals and doctors. It is a racket of organized crime – to put it simply and directly.

But in all this such doctors and their colluders forget that what they try to hide is very visible from One who watches and to Whom they are all answerable.

So ask yourself these questions:

1.    How would you like to be in the care of a doctor exactly like yourself?
2.    How would you like to be the victim of a doctor working to meet a commercial target who exploits you by prescribing treatment you don’t need and inflicting suffering on you so that he can generate bills for surgical procedures, investigations and treatments which are useless or may even be harmful?
3.    How would you like to be in the care of a doctor for whom you were the first and most important priority?
4.    How would you like to be in the care of a doctor who was interested only in your welfare, ensuring that you received the best care, in the most compassionate way at the lowest possible cost?
5.    How you would like to be in the dua of all those you help through their pain and sickness?
6.    How would you like to cursed by all those you victimized, deceived, exploited and abused?

Finally I say to those of you who still want to take commissions and work to meet commercial targets, ‘See you on the Day of Judgment before the Throne of my Rabb.’

Remember my dear friends what your Creator, AllahY said:
أَلَمْ يَعْلَمْ بِأَنَّ اللَّهَ يَرَى
Alaq 96: 14   Doesn’t he know that Allah is watching?