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Speech by His Highness The Aga Khan IV at McMaster University, Canada

(His Highness The Aga Khan was conferred with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree (LLD) honoris causa in recognition of his leadership in the advancement of health and education in the third world)

May 15, 1987

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

……………..The great bulk of the 7 million people of Karachi and the 100 million people of Pakistan are not ruled by the assumptions of science. Their lives are bounded by family, tradition, and belief

These are people who are our patients, who receive our community health services. We most earnestly hope that they are also the people who will provide our young nurses and doctors. To reach them, to have truly effective medical and health care, the Aga Khan University and Hospital must do things the West and science probably cannot teach us.

Perhaps such joint efforts as those we conduct with McMaster may lead to innovations that we can share with the world. Think of our task on several levels. The level of the individual, the critically ill, poor Pakistani patient lying in the antiseptic environment of a ward, where he is tended by instruments and a crisp, educated nurse.

But we increasingly ask ourselves, what combination of family members to serve and hearten him, food he recognizes, even music and TV in his Sindhi-Urdu tradition, will humanize his environment. Most importantly, what attitudes and cultural understandings of the nursing and medical staff will give him heart and hasten his recovery?

Can such inputs even provide economies and bring the cost of modern medical care more easily within his means? How do we build these understandings and attitudes in our systems and training and service?

You are graduating with a professional qualification. The courses that led to your degree have their powerful internal logic. Your profession has its assumptions about standards and increasingly about its rights and privileges.

But the world you enter will not be labeled physiology, cardiology, and genetics. It is a world of unwell, fearful people. Professional standards and assumptions can provide a form of intolerance, pride, and myopia, as intractable as the rigidities of traditional societies.

As you know far better than I, science alone will not give us much guidance on when to prolong human life and whether to intervene in its creation. The industrialized world only rather recently has rediscovered that these questions engage not merely professional ethics and standards, they touch the deeply held convictions of a Judeo-Christian tradition, an idea of humanity that has challenged the prophets and philosophers for thousands of years.

Nations cannot assign these issues to a priesthood of scientists. They require the sources of the human spirit as well as mind. The Islamic world is dealing with these questions on two fronts simultaneously.

First in the re-introduction of science and its sceptical world view that it is not part of current tradition. Second, Islamic societies are rediscovering the importance of the modern, secular world of their Islamic ethical underpinning.

Is it any surprise that there is soul searching and social upheaval but also intellectual vitality and tumult among the people of the Islamic world?

Science is a wonderfully powerful tool and research budgets are essential. But science is only the beginning in the new age we are entering. My hope is that in Islamic Pakistan the Aga Khan University and Hospital can make progress in developing new models.

Islam does not perceive the world as two separate domains of mind and spirit, science and belief. Science and the search for knowledge are an expression of Man’s designation role in the universe. But they do not define that role totally. Surely there is no more worthy role in which East and West can work to bond these two aspects of Man’s understanding than the field of health sciences that our graduates enter this evening.

The world is an infinitely exciting place. You have been wonderfully trained. I congratulate you and urge you to move forward with all reason, imagination and human understanding.

Thank you