Nursing in Islam

In Islam, nurses provide healthcare services to patients, families and communities as a manifestation of love for Allah and Muhammad. The nursing profession is not new to Islam. Islamic traditions include sympathy for and responsibility toward those in need.This perspective had emerged during the development of Islam as a religion, culture, and civilization.

Ethos of Health Care Service

In Islamic traditions caring is the manifestation of love for Allah and Muhammad. Caring in Islam, however, is more than the act of empathy; instead, it consists of being responsible for, sensitive to, and concerned with those in need, namely the weak, the suffering and the outcasts of society. This act of caring is further divided into three principles: intention, thought, and action. Intention and thought refer to who/what/where/when/ and why to care, whereas action is related to the knowledge necessary to be able to care. In short, health care is deemed as service to the patients and to Allah, as opposed to other professions that are commercial based. This ethos was the fundamental motivating factor for the majority of the doctors and nurses in the history of Islam.

Approach to Health Care Service

Another aspect of Islamic health care service that distinguishes it from contemporary Western health care industry is the holistic approach to health and wellbeing taken. This holistic approach consisted of treating both the organic basis of the ailments and to provide spiritual support for the patient. This spiritual component comes in the form of Tawheed (Oneness of Allah), a dimension lacking in current Western models of Nursing and, thus, could pose as a challenge for application of this model of Nursing to Muslim patients as it does not meet their holistic needs.

The First Muslim Nurse

The first professional nurse in the history of Islam is a woman named, Rufaidah bint Sa’ad, from the Bani Aslam tribe in Medina. She lived at the time of Muhammed and was among the first people in Medina to accept Islam. Rufaidah received her training and knowledge in medicine from her father, a physician, whom she assisted regularly. After the Muslim state was established in Medina, she would treat the ill in her tent set up outside the mosque. During times of war, she would lead a group of volunteers to the battlefield and would treat casualties and injured soldiers.

Rufaidah is described as a woman possessing the qualities of an ideal nurse: compassionate, empathetic, good leader and a great teacher, passing on her clinical knowledge to others she trained. Furthermore, Rufaidah’s activities as someone greatly involved in the community, in helping those at the more disadvantaged portions of society epitomize the ethos of care identified above.

Nursing in Hospitals

In hospitals built in the Medieval Muslim society male nurses tended to male patients and female nurses to female patients. The hospital in Al-Qayrawan (Kairouan in English) was especially unique among Muslim hospitals for several reasons. Built in 830 by the order of the Prince Ziyadat Allah I of Ifriqiya (817-838), the Al-Dimnah Hospital, constructed in the Dimnah region close to the great mosque of Al Qayrawan, was quite ahead of its time. It had the innovation of having a waiting area for visitors, not to mention the fact that the first official female nurses were hired from Sudan to work in this hospital. Moreover, aside from regular physicians working there, a group of religious imams who also practiced medicine, called Fugaha al-Badan provided service as well, likely by tending the patients’ spiritual needs.