Agency & Vaccine Mandates
This is not a video arguing for or against vaccination. It is a reflection on the importance of human agency and its centrality in one’s psycho-biological-spiritual health from a Fitra-centric, Islamic medicine (Hikma) perspective.
This is a video about the appreciation of human agency. Agency is the innate faculty within all human beings to impress their will unto the world. It is one of the many gifts afforded to Man and Woman by their Merciful Creator to employ choice in their moral lives for the sake of God and goodness. It is through this innate institution of agency that we become mukallaf (morally responsible) and answerable to God on the Day of Judgement. Its reality is not a light matter to write-off.
From a health perspective, the power of will is indispensable as it serves Man’s inner compass and conscience; without agency, human beings are left to feel impotent and without purpose. The loss of agency is one of the greatest causes of disease in the world. Especially of psycho-emotional disease, but, as elucidated in the video, disease fomenting in one part of the human constitution does not remain isolated therein but eventually permeates through the totality of one’s being. This is what we mean by a holistic conceptualization of Man: an appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things within the human constitution of jism-nafs-ruh (body-mind-spirit) as well as that which is between human beings and the greater macrocosm. It can be said that by destroying a person’s will, we impair the very dynamis, the very animating force or soul, of that human being. I ask you, what can be more reprehensible than that?
Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah (1), speaks about human agency and the need for governance to be cautious in not dominating people to the point of breaking them, i.e destroying their souls. He goes on to say:
"If, however, the domination with its laws is one of brute force and intimidation, it breaks their [the citizenry] fortitude and deprives them of their power of resistance as a result of the inertness that develops in the souls of the oppressed.
When laws are enforced by means of punishment, they completely destroy fortitude, because the use of punishment against someone who cannot defend himself generates in that person a feeling of humiliation that, no doubt, must break his fortitude."
My contention is that this depriving of the citizenry's 'power of resistance' (i.e choice) is not only creating the conditions for a scourge of psychological affliction (which would be sufficiently harmful) but also one that is related to a decreased power of immune resistance and resilience (lowered immunity) that inevitably leads to not only greater domination by oppressive external forces but also to greater susceptibility to infection- increasingly important during a pandemic where susceptibility to the virus is the main driver of transmission, not mere exposure.
Domination and duress scatters the soul. The individual and social resultants of this domination are mirrors of one another in the macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds of human life; and the continued ignorance of these realities is a sign of the deterioration of the Fitra and the imperious domination of an anti-Fitra world where the entire definition of what it means to be healthy and integrated are flipped upside-down.
Citations:
IBN KHALDŪN, & ROSENTHAL, F. (1967). The Muqaddimah: an introduction to history. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press
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Mazen Atassi, ND
Dr. Mazen is a naturopathic doctor, classic homeopath, and Hikma therapist. To learn more about him and his services visit: www.forwardtohealth.com/dr-mazen