The Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology

Health, Health Care, and Medical Education in the Arab World 403
Some countries (member states) gave incomplete responses. Each of the 18
nations has at least one medical school except for Qatar and Mauritania,
which have none. Kuwait, Oman, and United Arab Emirates have one medical
school each. At the other extreme, Iraq has six; Algeria, nine; and Egypt, nineteen.
Amongthe oldest medical schools are: University of Baghdad (Iraq,
founded in 1927); American University in Beirut (Lebanon, 1867); University
of Khartoum (The Sudan, 1924); University of Damascus (Syria, 1919); and, in
Egypt, University of Cairo (1827) and University of Alexandria (1942). Western
colonial influence was strongin the Middle East and North Africa prior to
World War II. The few medical schools started duringthis earlier period owe
their establishment to western initiative. Later, under the recently decolonialized
national governments, many schools were begun in the fifties, sixties, and
seventies. The most recently established is that in United Arab Emirates, which
admitted its first class in 1986.
To study the dynamics of medical education in any developingcountry of the
globe is to seize upon a particularly symbolic fulcrum for social change in that
country. This is particularly true in the Arab world. Many countries in South
America, Africa, and South Asia are undergoing struggles in the effort to modernize
in the fast-paced era of economic and cultural globalization. Aside from
industrial and commercial development, two pivotal features of modernization
are the drive toward the implementation of scientific knowledge for human
betterment and toward greater respect for the rights and the potential of the
individual human being. Medicine and health care tie together these two objectives.
Though increasingly assisted by other health professions, the physician
remains the key actor. As proto-physicians, medical students are an especially
strategic group for embodying national expectations and visions.
Cultural ultural Tensions ensions in Medical edical Education ducation
Tension is felt in all developingsocieties between still powerful cultural traditions
and the pull toward the future. Nowhere is the tension greater than in the
Arab world. Medicine is seemingly a universally acclaimed and non-controversial
ingredient in the formula for progress. Medical education of course goes
alongwith medicine. What could be more solidly aligned with the future yet
culturally impartial than the preparation of the next generation of doctors?
Yet there are within the structure of medical education in the Arab world
several veins of controversy ± features that call into question its Arab-Islamic
legitimacy. These are: (1) the struggle to reappropriate the historic medieval
Arab medical heritage as a contemporary guide in the medical school curriculum;
(2) the use of western languages (especially English) with medical students
as the ``language of instruction''; and (3) the emancipatory pressure of medical
learningand activity upon the traditional proprieties of gender.
These features of controversy will be dealt with serially below.
1 In the history of western culture it is an accepted truth that in the long
interval between the end of Roman imperial culture and the western Renaissance,
Arab scholars studied, translated into Arabic, and promulgated classical