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.^[1]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.^[1] 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.^[1] This act of caring is further divided into three principles: intention, thought, and action.^[1] 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.^[1] In short, health care is deemed as service to the patients and to Allah, as opposed to other professions that are commercial based.^[1] This ethos was the fundamental motivating factor for the majority of the doctors and nurses in the history of Islam.^[1]

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.^[1] This holistic approach consisted of treating both the organic basis of the ailments and to provide spiritual support for the patient.^[1] 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.^[1]

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.^[2] She lived at the time of Muhammed and was among the first people in Medina to accept Islam.^[2] Rufaidah received her training and knowledge in medicine from her father, a physician, whom she assisted regularly.^[2] After the Muslim state was established in Medina, she would treat the ill in her tent set up outside the mosque.^[3] During times of war, she would lead a group of volunteers to the battlefield and would treat casualties and injured soldiers.^[3]

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.^[2] Furthermore, Rufaidah’s activities as someone greatly involved in the community, in helping those at the more disadvantaged portions of society^[2] 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.^[4] 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.^[5] 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.^[5] Moreover, aside from regular physicians working there, a group of religious imams who also practiced medicine, called Fugaha al-Badan^[5] provided service as well, likely by tending the patients’ spiritual needs.

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