Egypt has an estimated 6 million drug addicts, about 7 percent of the population. Al Jazeera reports.
Psychiatrist quoted in the report: “You need to go to the people who have started to experiment with cigarette smoking by the age of 8, who are dropouts of school, who are not doing very well in school, who have violence in their family or in their personal history, who are experimenting with sex. So these are the sort of ‘naughty boys’ and the programs are not designed to reach out to them.”
The psychiatrist is identified as a specialist in drug addiction, but his specialty has limited application in fighting addiction. He is a medical doctor who can write prescriptions that will treat the side effects of drug detox, but more psychologists and social workers are needed, an assertion that in both my experience and my reading is controversial.
Here’s Khaled Abou El Fadl (book: ‘The Great Theft’) describing Islamic ‘puritans’ approach to the social sciences:
To become truly modernized, according to the puritans, means to regress back in time and recreate the golden age of Islam. This, however, does not mean that they want to abolish technology and scientific advancements. Rather, their program is deceptively simple – Muslims should learn the science and technology invented by the West, but in order to resist Western culture, Muslims should not seek to study the social sciences or humanities.
The puritanical strain’s influence on ‘orthodox’ or conservative Muslims in discouraging individuals from choosing these professions damages the larger community’s ability to engage drug addicts with talk therapy and other therapys derived from the social sciences that could greatly improve treatment. I take this as an answer to why there are not enough Muslim psychologists and social workers. This seems to be a trans-national problem in Muslim communities.
