Forgotten Heroes
The Unknown Hero
We know a great deal about the heroes of this series. We know Rufaida’s tent beside the mosque of the…
Ibn Khaldūn
He was seventeen when the plague swept through Tunis and took from him almost everything he knew. In the years…
Husain Abdul Sattar
Anyone meeting him for the first time often thinks they are standing before a Shaykh from Damascus, not a pathology…
Marwa el-Sherbini
Much has been written about Marwa el-Sherbini, almost always only about the few minutes of her death. Here we want…
Prof. Malik Badri
When people today discuss Muslim contributions to modern psychology, the Western schools usually come first and the Muslim pioneers last.…
Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu
When Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu was eighty years old, he did not retire. He took up pen and brush and began to…
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
He was a jurist, the closest student of Ibn Taymiyya, and he sat with his teacher in the citadel of…
Ibn an-Nafīs
Three hundred years before Europe came to it, a physician in Cairo opened the textbook of Ibn Sīnā. There it…
Abū al-Qāsim az-Zahrāwī
In the surgical volume of his great encyclopedia, az-Zahrāwī did something no one had done before him. He drew the…
Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī
One of the oldest independent works of medical ethics begins not with an illness but with a trust. It is…
Abū Zayd al-Balkhī
A thousand years before the word „psychosomatic“ was coined, a scholar in Balkh wrote a sentence that medicine only rediscovered…
Ibn Abī Ramtha at-Tamīmī
A man comes to Medina. He has never seen the Prophet ﷺ before. He is a physician, skilled with his…
Fatima al-Fihri
Behind nearly every great physician in Islamic history stands a place where he was permitted to learn. One of the…
Al-Shifa bint Abdullah
Her birth name was Laila. Yet everyone called her only „Al-Shifa,“ the Healing. Al-Shifa was among the first Muslim women…
Rufaida al-Aslamiyya
More than a thousand years before the world knew the name Florence Nightingale, there lived in Medina a woman who…
Dr. Mohamed Mashally
Many knew him as the doctor of the poor. For decades he treated people who could barely afford medical care.…