Prayer and Medical Science
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Maulana Sahib says that his daughter and son had a dangerous accident! His daughter remained admitted in the ICU for eighteen days. During this period, the doctors maintained a vague, worrying medical outlook. But Maulana Sahib continued to recite Surah al-Fātiḥa over his daughter every day and kept praying. He claims that it was this act of his that gave his daughter life again! Then, presenting his personal experience as an example before the public, he says that you too should strengthen your relationship with God in the same way. If, instead of asking anyone else, you ask only God for anything, you will surely receive it!
This mentality of deeming material means inferior, and then raising a whole generation upon that mentality, is— in my view— one of the fundamental reasons for the downfall of the community. People say Muslims are behind in the world because of conspiracies by others or because of a bitter historical past. I believe the opposite. If Muslims are being humiliated in the world today, one of the most important reasons is the superstitious beliefs within the Muslim mind. These beliefs distance Muslims so far from action that young men and women become accustomed to living in an imaginary world— just as a drug addict becomes addicted to a narcotic. Living continuously in an imaginary, heavenly world, most people of the community lose their capacity to think and understand. Their minds do not even raise a question, out of fear that the question might pull them down from the beautiful and comforting valleys of their perfect heavenly world— that is, that their faith might be “damaged.” And once a community begins to consider questioning itself as a flaw, then decline becomes its inevitable destiny.
Anyway, let us return to Maulana Sahib’s prayers and recitations. In all religions, prayer (du‘ā) is given great importance. Islam, too, repeatedly emphasizes praying to God. Islam even restricts supplication exclusively to God— meaning you cannot ask through prayer from anyone other than God, not even from Muhammad. This is the theological position. But ever since humans began to think and reason, this question has troubled all theologians and philosophers: what exactly does prayer do? When we look around, we see that all our work happens through the movement of physical matter. A matchstick ignites when struck, clothes dry when wind blows, a person gets sick when infected. No one has ever observed that someone recited something, blew on it, and a computer code wrote itself and began running! Someone recited something and the toilet cleaned itself— without water or a piece of clay! Meaning we never see any result that occurs without material causation. So when all processes run through physical matter, what is the role of prayer—and where does it act? In other words, at what point in these material processes does prayer exert its influence?
The philosophers and theologians of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have grappled with this question. The conclusions they have broadly reached are as follows:
Some say prayer is a cause, but a non-physical cause, which influences physical causes at some level. Whether that level is probabilistic quantum phenomena or something else, we do not know.
Some say prayer is a pre-condition, upon whose fulfillment God directly intervenes in physical processes— meaning God Himself sets a rule that “If My servant prays, I will help him outside the chain of material causes.” How and where this happens, we do not know.
Some say prayer does not move external physical matter, but it changes a person’s own psychology, motivation, patience, clarity, and stress-response. These internal changes alter his decisions and actions, which then change outcomes. That is, prayer makes you a better person; because you become better, your actions improve, and therefore your results improve.
Some say prayer is an “alignment process”— synchronizing human thoughts with divine will. Prayer makes you patient and grateful. Then you accept every outcome as God-given, and your inner turmoil disappears.
Some say prayer is simply the expression of servitude— pure devotion. The purpose of prayer is not the outcome, but submission.
If we reflect on all these definitions, we can understand the scope, importance, and limits of prayer— and we should understand it.
Now leaving religion aside, let us discuss atheists. Since they deny God altogether, prayer for them is a meaningless act. One atheist defined prayer as:
“Prayer is the foolish insistence that the Creator of such a vast universe might alter His universal order for a trivial creature like me.”
Richard Dawkins, in his famous book The God Delusion, mentions a “Prayer Experiment” in which researchers tried to test whether patients in a hospital would recover better if prayers were offered for half of them and not for the other half. Dawkins reports that despite spending a lot of money, the experiment produced no evidence in favor of prayer.
This seems somewhat true as well. If prayer alone were such a major factor in healing, then the world wouldn’t have needed vaccines for polio eradication; and in countries that sincerely believe in God, people would get sick less often, or recover quickly if they did. But we do not find any such God-believing nation where most people recover from cancer. Nor have we seen any religious leader reciting something to give sight to the blind or a leg to the lame. Nor have we ever heard of an imam reciting something so powerful that the entire congregation could hear him without a microphone! It cannot be denied that prayer does have a domain of influence— but it is crucial to understand where and how much. One must integrate this understanding into one’s faith: the station of prayer is indeed lofty, but not higher than action. A task that requires action— I would not say it cannot happen through prayer alone, but I can surely say that the probability of it happening through prayer alone is extremely low.
Some people give examples like “so-and-so survived despite being close to death, and someone else died despite being close to survival.” No matter how many such examples you bring, none can conclusively prove that something happened “only” because of prayer. In statistics, a famous saying is taught: “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.” Meaning two events occurring together does not prove that one caused the other. For example, the Maulana in the video recited Surah al-Fātiḥa, and his daughter recovered. But this does not prove that she recovered because of that recitation. To prove such a cause-and-effect relationship, many controlled experiments would be required before any conclusion could be drawn.
Among Muslims, it is common practice to leave all difficult tasks to prayer while doing all small tasks themselves. As mentioned earlier, they will clean the toilet themselves but expect God to handle medical treatment! You may call this humility. Humility is good, but when humility becomes another name for mental slavery, it ruins a community. God has given humans intellect. Intellect is a great blessing. On the Day of Judgment, one will be asked whether he used his intellect or not. Use your intellect, and respect those who use theirs. Along with thanking God, thank doctors as well, and thank science and scientists too— for the Prophet said, “He who does not thank the people cannot thank God.”
Furthermore, whichever lawful method has a higher chance of success is closer to the Sunnah— because it is very likely that the Prophet would have chosen that method if it had existed in his time. If antibiotics had been invented in the 7th century, they would certainly have been included among the Sunnah practices.