We have much to gain from the 'great Arab doctor'

We have much to gain from the 'great Arab doctor'
By Clive Cookson
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: July 7 2007 03:00 | Last updated: July 7 2007 03:00


All week, commentators in Britain have been expressing outraged surprise that doctors, of all people, should have tried to commit mass murder in the cause of jihad.

Of course it is shocking for those in the National Health Service to hear of terrorist allegations about colleagues they thought were dedicated to healing. But it is naive for the world in general to imagine that the medical profession somehow contains "better" people who are less likely to kill for a cause than those in other walks of life.

Once one accepts that violent revolutionaries may come from relatively prosperous backgrounds, then doctors are an obvious recruiting ground for extremism - particularly in the Middle East, where medicine has long been one of the largest and most prestigious professions.

The great tradition of Islamic medicine, established during the Middle Ages, still resonates today in the Arab world.

At the same time, medicine is a geographically mobile profession, because people and their health problems are essentially the same around the world. A doctor who trains in Iraq or Jordan can transfer to the UK more easily than a lawyer or many types of academic. Several thousand foreign-trained Muslim doctors are working in the NHS, including many distinguished hospital consultants.

Medicine has a long history of involvement in revolutionary violence. Physicians who took part in the French revolution included Joseph Guillotin, eponymous promoter of the device that sliced the heads off an estimated 20,000 aristocrats and counter-revolutionaries, and Jean Paul Marat, a leader of the extreme Jacobin faction responsible for the reign of terror in 1793. A more recent advocate of "revolutionary medicine" wasDr Che Guevara, the Cuban guerrilla organiser.

Even more relevant to the events of the past week is the leadership provided by physicians in the Arab world's revolutionary movements of the late 20th century. George Habash, a paediatrician from a Christian Palestinian background, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which became notorious for hijacking aircraft in the early 1970s. Several senior figures in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including Mahmoud Zahar, Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Mohammed al-Hindi, trained in medicine.

The most obvious role model for medical involvement in al-Qaeda terrorism is Ayman al-Zawahiri, often described as deputy to Osama bin Laden. Mr Zawahiri came from a prominent medical family and trained as a surgeon in Egypt.

With hindsight, what is more surprising than the involvement of doctors in a terrorist plot is their incompetence in carrying it out. Doctors are practical people, with a scientific training, who might have been expected to explode a car bomb successfully, particularly if they were willing to blow themselves up in the process. The young men from humble backgrounds who carried out theJuly 7 attacks in 2005 were more effective suicide bombers than the two professionals who drove a vehicle laden with petrol and gas cylinders into the Glasgow airport terminal.

Also surprising - and obviously a great relief - is that the would-be bombers did not use their medical connections to include biological or radioactive materials in their car bombs. Although neither is a microbiologist or radiologist, one might have expected the bombers to have got hold of some bacterial or viral cultures or radio-isotopes from their hospitals. These would not have had to be lethal to spread alarm and magnify the psychological impact of the bombs, because people are so frightened of germs and radiation.

Doctors who are prepared to kill and injure in pursuit of what they see as a grand cause may feel that the Hippocratic oath - and the associated injunction to "do no harm" - applies to the way they treat their individual patients, rather than to actions outside their professional sphere. They are not contravening medical ethics in the same way as Harold Shipman and Josef Mengele, to take two extreme examples of doctors guilty of mass murder and torture of patients.

There is no reason to believe that those who combine medicine and militancy behave badly while they are on duty (though they may not be particularly good doctors - it emerged yesterday that two brothers arrested last weekend, Sabeel and Kafeel Ahmed, had applied on more than one occasion to work in Western Australia but were rejected because of concerns over their medical qualifications and references).

Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that some patients are cancelling medical appointments with doctors who have Arab or Islamic-sounding names. Certainly there are poisonous postings on websites warning people to avoid Arab doctors. "Now your once great Arab doctors can no longer be trusted," is a mild example.

The secondary effects of terrorism, both the disruption caused by additional security measures and the loss of social cohesion when certain sections of the population come under suspicion, are always more far-reaching than the original incidents. Any loss of public confidence in Arab or Muslim doctors - and discriminatory measures that would make it harder for physicians to come to work in Britain from the Middle East than from other parts of the world - would be a tragedy for the NHS. There are still "great Arab doctors" working in Britain today and, if we encourage them, there will be more in future generations.

The writer is the FT's science editor