The other classroom: Returning to sacred knowledge
Chicago, Illinois - The breathing machine was too loud for the dying man's son to hear his father's final words. Tariq Lateef held the phone
Chicago, Illinois - The breathing machine was too loud for the dying man's son to hear his father's final words. Tariq Lateef held the phone to his patient's mouth anyway. When the words disappeared beneath the mechanical hiss, Lateef repeated them himself, sentence by sentence, into the speaker. Although the son arrived before his father died, by the time he did, his father was no longer conscious. The moment stayed with Lateef. Six months earlier, he had cared for the man's wife through the same illness, helping the family reach the decision that allowed her to die peacefully at home. Now the husband had reached the same point. He was exhausted. The treatments keeping him alive had become the very thing preventing him from saying goodbye. Lateef, 40, did everything medicine had trained him to do. Afterwards, he says, he "felt so inadequate" trying to understand the role of the physician when death could no longer be postponed.
It wasn't simply that he wanted better answers. He wanted to understand the problem itself. What is medicine actually for? What makes a death good? Who gets to decide? Lateef is a hospice and palliative care physician, yet the longer he has practised, the more he has found himself reaching beyond the limits of everything he has been taught. He began pulling at the foundations beneath modern medical ethics. "At the application level, it felt very sophisticated, but when you trace back to what all of this rests on? It felt very flimsy, honestly." One seminar has never left him. Academics debated whether monkeys have more right to live than human babies because of their greater perceptual capacity. "That's what happens when you get too abstract," he says. "That is not how normal human beings think." The search took him somewhere unexpected. It began with a chance conversation about Islamic bioethics.
At a conference at the University of Chicago, he listened to Dr Aasim Padela move effortlessly between clinical medicine and Islamic thought. "It was the first time, honestly, in my life that I felt like this is someone who's whole," Lateef recalls. "He didn't sound like someone who was just throwing out disconnected Islamic terms. It just felt so whole." The lecture answered one uncertainty, and it exposed another. If this knowledge existed, why had it taken him so long to find it? Lateef often describes himself as someone with "a million-dollar education". But another thought had been troubling him long before he ever walked into that lecture hall. "If Allah gave me life to 80 or 100," he says, "I wouldn't even be able to understand the Quran." For years, he had lived with what felt like two separate educations. One had taught him how to become a physician.
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