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Omar Hasan Kasule, MBChB (MUK), MPH, DrPH(Harvard) graduated from MakerereUniversity in Uganda and subsequently

obtained his postgraduate training in public health,including a doctorate in epidemiology, from HarvardUniversity. He was a fellow at Harvard and taught acourse on the delivery of maternal and child healthservices. At the Harvard Dana Farber CancerInstitute in Boston, Massachusetts, he worked oncancer clinical trials and analysis of cancer epidemi-ological data from the Eastern Cooperative OncologyGroup (ECOG). Additionally, Dr. Kasule obtained acertification in Arabic and Islamic studies from Bilalinstitute in Kampala, Uganda.

From 1987 to 1995, Dr. Kasule was in the UnitedStates managing development projects involvingeducation and health in North America and theCaribbean and was a clinical epidemiology qualityassurance consultant in several states.

After working in the United States, Dr. Kasuleaccepted a position at the newly establishedInternational Islamic University in Malaysia, wherefrom 1995 to 2005 he held the appointments of pro-fessor of medicine, deputy dean for research andpostgraduate afairs, and founding chief editor of theInternational Medical Journal (www-e-imj.com). Dr.Kasule’s teachings emphasize the study and practiceof medicine that integrates social and ethical valuesinto the medical curriculum. He has 7 years experi-ence conducting problem-based learning sessionsfor undergraduates.

Since June 2005, Dr. Kasule has been on the facul-ty of medicine of the University of Brunei, where heteaches undergraduate students epidemiology, bio-statistics, and medical ethics. He teaches postgradu-ate courses on advanced research methods and evi-dence-based health policy and practice. The KingFahd Medical City in Riyadh was fortunate in recruit-ing Dr. Kasule to its faculty of medicine in 2009.

Dr. Kasule has served as an external examiner

and consultant for sev-eral universities. Fluentin six languages, Dr.Kasule over the last 24years has traveled, inaddition to his medicalwork, to many coun-tries conducting man-agement programs forn o n g o v e r n m e n t a lorganizations and com-munity leaders.

Dr. Kasule is a con-sultant on Islamic med-icine and the integra-tion of Islam into med-ical practice and teach-

ing for many hospitals and faculties of medicine inthe southeastern Asia region. His writings on thesedisciplines can be accessed at http://omarkasule.tri-pod.com

I was first introduced to Dr. Kasule in June 2008when he presented at the NOOR Forum in Madinah,Saudi Arabia. After that I invited Dr. Kasule to visitKing Fahd Medical City (KFMC) in Riyadh and had thepleasure of getting to know him better. The theme ofhis presentations and discussions at KFMC involvedhis passion and contribution to the incorporation ofIslamic values and ethos into medical curriculumand helping graduate and train Muslim physiciansempowered with the highest ethical values. Hisdiverse presentations to staff, students, and adminis-tration received exceptional evaluations, and hispersonal mannerisms—soft spoken, polite but firm,knowledgeable yet humble—were indeed a pleasureto experience. He is a real role model. His pioneer-ing work across Indonesia, Malaysia, and, morerecently, Brunei, has transformed medical educationin a significant number of medical schools in south-east Asia. This has resulted in Dr. Kasule being a

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sought-after scholar all over the globe. His presenta-tion at KFMC, “Medical-Ethical-Legal LearningPractice—A Trans-Cultural InternationalExperience,” was absolutely brilliant. In this presen-tation, Dr. Kasule reviewed the theory and principlesin medical ethics used in training programs andshared his personal experience in three continents(Antartica and Australia excluded) and 11 countries.

I requested Dr. Kasule to describe the reasonsthat led him on this very unusual career path, andhere is his explanation:

Professor Kasule, like most Muslim intellectualsof today, was exposed to the crisis of duality in edu-cation from his youngest days in the late 1950s whenhe attended Arabic Islamic schools in the morningand secular English schools in the afternoon. He wasmotivated to find a solution to the crisis of duality orintellectual schizophrenia among Muslim intellectu-als exposed to two systems of education with differ-ent and contradictory world views. In the 1970s hemotivated groups of Muslim teachers to developIslamic religious knowledge modules for East Africansecondary schools.

In the 1980s, while completing his postgraduatetraining in public health at Harvard, he shifted hisattention to addressing the duality crisis by flyingmore than half a million miles, running workshopsunder the aegis of the International Federation ofStudent Organizations. These workshops addressedthe holistic Tauhidi-based personal, leadership, andintellectual development of youths in all continentsexcept Australia.

In the early 1990s, as director of education andleadership training programs based in Virginia, headdressed the duality crisis by working with Islamicschools in North America and all over the worldunder the umbrella of International Bureau for

Education Research and Resources. The focus wasdeveloping curricula and teaching materials thatwould reflect the Islamic world view in all schoolsubjects and thus mitigate the effects of the dualitycrisis. He took a momentous decision in 1995 to moveto the newly established faculty of medicine at theInternational Islamic University in Malaysia andapplied the experience of three decades of workingon the duality crisis to the development of Islamicinput into the medical curriculum that would ensurethat future physicians would learn and practice med-icine with embedded Islamic values and fiqh. He con-tinued the same mission when he became a professorof epidemiology and Islamic medicine at the newlyestablished faculty of medicine of the University ofBrunei in 2005.

Over the past 13 years he has written and lec-tured extensively in Southeast Asia and other partsof the world on integrated medical curricula, andmany medical schools have adopted his ideas (Seehttp://omarkasule.tripod.com). Since 2008 he hastransfered his experience in the medical field toother university disciplines as director of the IslamicEpistemology and Curriculum Reform Project (seewww.i-epistemology.net).

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