In recent decades, the Egyptian public sphere has witnessed increasing and sometimes heated discussions around mental disorders like depression and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). These debates, carried out among psychiatrists, religious scholars and Quranic healers, have centered on the question whether such afflictions are due to neurochemical brain imbalances and life’s stresses or to the devil’s temptation coupled with a person’s weak faith. The significance of these arguments lies in their articulation of diverse understandings of affliction, causation and reality that point to the different ontologies at work in contemporary Egypt and to a society-wide reflection over the boundaries between science and religion. This presentation analyzes the debates surrounding the conceptualization of and the relationship between OCD (al-wasw?s al-qahr?) and devil’s whispers (wasw?s al-shay??n), focusing on the positions of psychiatrists and of the practitioners of a popular form of treatment with the Quran known as Quranic healing (al-‘il?g bi-l-Qur’?n). On the basis of interviews and the analysis of published materials, one can distinguish two main positions emerging in these debates. The first involves drawing an ontological equivalence between OCD and the devil’s whispers. For some Quranic healers what psychiatrists identify as OCD is in fact the devil’s whispers to which a weak self gives course. In this way a psychological and physical affliction is transformed into a moral one denying in the process the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. The symmetrical opposite is the claim of some psychiatrists that what Quranic healers take as the devil’s whispers is in fact OCD. According to the second position, adopted by both psychiatrists and Quranic healers, there are two types of ‘whispers’—pathological and the devil’s— and therefore two distinguishable afflictions with overlapping symptoms each with its own etiology and forms of treatment. In this way, both Quranic healers and psychiatrists see OCD and the devil’s whispers as sometimes coexisting and other times as mutually exclusive. The coexistence of these different perspectives and the debates themselves point not to a clear-cut relation between psychiatry and forms of religious healing, but to dynamic, ongoing processes of redefining what is physically versus morally treatable and of redrawing the boundaries between what counts as religious and what as scientific in relation to mental disorders. It is through such processes that both psychiatric and Islamic traditions are remade in contemporary Egypt.

Although the statistics are contested by international NGOs and official sources, the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has recently gained greater recognition within Iran. This comes simultaneously with a shift in public health frameworks, which have become increasingly globalized and couched in the language of human rights. The United Nations General Assembly passed the nonbinding Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS in 2001 as part of the Millennium Development Goals. As a signatory to the Declaration, Iran has committed to recognizing the human rights of those affected by HIV/AIDS, including nondiscrimination and access to health care. However, this linkage of the epidemic and a universal human rights discourse stands in contradiction to Iran’s opposition to the human rights agenda, which the state in many instances constructs as a tool of cultural imperialism and foreign interventionism (as in the 1993 Human Rights Conference in Vienna, when Iran and other countries asserted the limitations of universal human rights). This paper therefore uses the lens of HIV/AIDS policies to explore the Islamic Republic’s political ideology in a context of international human rights discourse and evaluates what kinds of spaces of possibility for treatment and prevention programs are created by this ideology. It draws on two sources: official statements regarding the scope, causes, and treatment of the epidemic; and both official Iranian and other, non-state news sources dealing with relations of the state to NGOs and other civil society actors treating HIV/AIDS. This paper finds that the Islamic Republic has constructed a unique brand of Islamist political resistance to the dominant discourse of human rights and that HIV/AIDS programs in particular have become a site of manifesting this anti-imperial identity. NGOs are especially vulnerable because of their trans-national nature; especially since government-run centers treating HIV/AIDS as well as associated risk behaviors are minimal compared to the work of NGOs and others, the relationship of the state to these actors has important consequences for Iran’s most vulnerable HIV/AIDS sufferers.

Over the last several decades, countries in the Middle East and North Africa have made considerable achievements in improving reproductive health services and outcomes. However, significant disparities persist between countries in the region and within individual countries. Studies investigating reproductive laws and policies, family planning program development, and the integration of paramedical personnel into program formulation has dominated the limited research agenda. However, the role of physicians, and specifically the reproductive health training that physicians receive, has been accorded little attention. In Jordan, physicians play an essential role in reproductive health care, as service providers, policy makers, and supervisors of paramedical staff. Consistent with broader regional trends, the majority of Jordanian physicians now receive their primary medical training in-county and an increasing number now enter directly into general practice after graduation. Consequently, exposure to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues in medical school is especially critical. Recent published studies have identified that improvements in physician education and training are key to improving women’s access to and adoption of modern methods of contraception, preventing unintended pregnancy, and addressing intimate partner violence. Further, although Jordan’s national family planning program was established in 1973, the National Population Council’s most recent strategic plan reflects a bolder commitment to increasing access to a range of contraceptive services and improving service delivery. Thus understanding what medical students are learning about reproductive health can help support and advance these overall strategic priorities. In 2010-2011 we conducted a rigorous, qualitative study to assess the reproductive health content of medical education in Jordan with a specific focus on contraception, unintended pregnancy and abortion, and intimate partner violence. Through 32 in-depth interviews with medical students at all four accredited medical schools, this study aimed to understand better medical students’ didactic and clinical exposure to SRH issues, identify curricular strengths and gaps, and learn about possibilities for expanding SRH content. We conducted content and thematic analyses using both a priori (pre-determined) codes and inductive techniques. The findings demonstrate that significant curricular gaps in contraceptive coverage (particularly with respect to emergency contraception) exist, misinformation about medico-legal issues surrounding abortion abound, and content related to intimate partner violence is inconsistent. We conclude this paper with a discussion of how the results from the study are informing curriculum reform efforts currently underway in the Kingdom.