ABSTRACT
The course of clinical theory and practice, in so far as it concerns mental ill-health, has proceeded, along several parallel or divergent tracks. Arthur Kleinman, for example, the Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, has made an important distinction between disease and illness, a distinction that applies to all ill-health, whether physical or mental. The mental health worker in a country like the UK is likely to stumble on differences in values or outlook between the immediate cultural orbit of the Muslim client, and the larger environment of the host culture. The whole field of experimental psychology, whether based on behaviourist or cognitive foundations, is self-debarred–by its own methodological scruples–from systematic interest in an environmental context like that of religious culture. The chapter shows that the Islamic paradigm does indeed offer a vision of community, self, and self-realisation which differs, in significant respects from the dominant philosophy of the modern West.
