The Salam Free Clinic at a church in north St. Louis grew out of a Memorial Day barbecue and a desire to help.
In 2007, about 50 Muslims intent on serving their community and their country, hosted a barbecue at the Veterans Affairs hospital at Jefferson Barracks, dishing out chicken and burgers to the patients and nurses.

It was the beginning of the Muslim Community of St. Louis, an organization dedicated to helping others. The following year, the organization returned to Jefferson Barracks and also added visits to homeless shelters, bringing food to the hungry.

A focus of the effort was to engage the community’s youth in good works, so typically half of the 40 or 50 Muslims volunteering were teenagers.

Many of the members of the group worship at two mosques in west St. Louis County. A Sunni mosque in Ballwin, Dar-ul-Islam, includes more than 200 doctors of mostly Pakistani and Indian descent. A Shiite mosque in Wildwood, Dar-al-Zahra, includes about 40 doctors, mostly of Iranian descent.

As the group’s service projects began to grow, some of the doctors at the two mosques began discussing ways to offer their medical expertise to those who fall through the cracks of the health care system. The doctors could have chosen to serve less well-off members at some of the St. Louis area’s more than 20 mosques. But they decided to approach a church in north St. Louis about a partnership.

The doctors “were not only interested in our own people,” said Bahar Bastani, president of Dar-al-Zahra and professor of internal medicine at St. Louis University. “We chose north city because there are so many people there who don’t have jobs and don’t have insurance. We picked the community, not by faith.”

Through a contact with Interfaith Partnership/Faith Beyond Walls, the doctors met the Rev. James Morris, pastor of Lane Tabernacle Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in north St. Louis, who has been a member of the Missouri Christian Health Alliance and Missouri Healthcare for All, and has fought against proposed Medicaid cuts.

They asked Morris if they could set up a free clinic on Saturdays. They would staff the clinic if Lane Tabernacle could provide the space.
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Source: St. Louis Post Despatch

Dr. Bahar Bastani talks with patient Mehdi Arianpour as Dr. Hamid Reza Amanatkar looks on at the Salam Free Clinic at Lane Tabernacle Christian Methodist Episcopal Church on Saturday, Dec. 22, 2012, in St. Louis. The clinic’s success spurred a second center, opening at a church in St. Peters. Photo by Erik M. Lunsford elunsford@post-dispatch.com