Bartholomew's Notes

The Revealer logs a report in the Hindustan Times about Islamic militant doctors in the UK:

Some Muslim doctors are allegedly refusing to treat patients with sex diseases and Aids because they believe that such ailments are result of sinful behaviour and punishments from God…Such “militant” doctors are generally found in inner-city areas with large ethnic population, such as Leeds, Bradford and London. They pass such patients to other GPs. They are not identified because of the fear of action by the General Medical Council.

This comes just a few weeks after a report that some Christian doctors and pharmacists in the USA are refusing to dispense contraception. But even taking into account likely patient embarrassment, why has no-one at all apparently made a formal complaint? And why can’t the journalist muster even one anonymous anecdote from someone referred elsewhere by their GP? What we’re left with is an article (based on a previous Mail on Sunday piece, which I have been unable to see) very short on specifics. We get only two sourced facts in the whole story. First:

Dr Jafer Qureshi of Muslim Council has been cited in Sunday Mail saying that 600 of 30,000 students in medical schools, about a 10th of the Muslim intake believe sexual diseases are a punishment for immorality.

OK, but a) how does that figure compare with other religiously-minded medical students; and b) how many of that 10% will allow that belief to affect their treatment of victims?

The second:

Dr Abu Osama of the Society of Muslim Doctors refused to condemn medics who refuse to treat sex ailments. He said Muslim doctors believed that the Quran over-rode any other law and order.

But who is he? The Society of Muslim Doctors does not have any web presence that I could find, and the only references I could find link it to Al-Muhajiroun, an extreme and buffoonish fundamentalist organisation with no standing among the vast majority of Muslims whatsoever. Why contact such a crackpot and obscure outfit when there is the rather more mainstream Muslim Doctors and Dentists Association?

he article also alleges that

Some students from the community are also refusing to accept the theory of evolution or to studying abortion, euthanasia or fertility procedures…The situation regarding Muslim medical students has become so serious that a senior professor at a leading medical school in London was prompted to contact the Sunday Mail [he means The Mail on Sunday] with a “dossier of complaints”. He is alleged to have said that everyone knows such a situation but the lecturers are scared to speak out. They would be accused of violating political correctness.

Accused by whom? Is it really the case that Muslim fundamentalists are qualifying as doctors without doing the work and that a “senior professor” has no other recourse than to contact anonymously a tabloid newspaper? That would be rather astonishing. And, we might ask by way of contrast, how do Christian medical students handle studying abortion and euthanasia? (and as euthanasia is illegal, is that really a subject studied?)

The above may indeed all be true (although a representative of the Muslim Association of Britain dismisses the GP-refusing-to-treat-patients story as “absurd” in today’s Guardian). But would it be too much to ask for actual case studies, ideally with names and dates? And some contextualisation?

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