Source: Express Tribune and Huffington Post
By: Dr. Faheem Younus
Sir, it was 1995, North Medical Ward of Lahore’s Mayo Hospital, where you famously said in your English-Punjabi accent,
“Putter ji, batti uthay balo, jithay hanaira howay”
(Son, light a candle where it’s dark).
You didn’t want your students to go abroad after completing medical school. You wondered what difference we will make in America, where, compared to Pakistan, there were abundant doctors; where there was so much light.
I left, however, as I had no choice, sir. Yet you had a point ─ a point that haunted me whenever I earned a new degree, another publication, or an accolade.
For years, the praise of my patients from New Jersey reminded me of the prayers of my patients from Old Anarkali. Mothers in America reminded me of my own mother in Pakistan.
“Is she waiting to see a doctor while her own son is treating patients in a foreign land?” I thought.
In healthcare, though, rationalisation comes fast. I quickly realised that regardless of who my patients were – a Pakistani boy, an American woman, a Spanish farmer, a Jewish rabbi or a transgender atheist – the face of pain and suffering is the same.
A plethora of enlightened doctors serving in our small community hospital, however, were an affirmation of your statement. It was all light, until one day two planes crashed in the World Trade Centre and pockets of dark ignorance about Islam and its Prophet (pbuh) started emerging in America. TV, radio, magazines, books, and the anonymous walls of the internet succumbed to a dark attack on my Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) character. Some were suggestive, others were direct.
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Americas, Free speach, Muslim Writers