I feel God put me here to help

Sunday, January 2nd 2005

Doctor brings healing to Laventille
By GERARD BEST

FACING certain death at the hands of a mighty Muslim warrior, a gentleman uttered the "Shahadah", thus declaring his willingness to convert to Islam.

The warrior killed the man all the same, thinking that the gentleman had pronounced the Muslim testimony of faith only as a means of escaping death.

When the Prophet Muhammad heard of it, he took the warrior to task for not giving the man the benefit of the doubt, saying, "Why did you kill him? Can you see his heart?"

When Dr Mansoor Ibrahim tells this tale, it's more than a colourful vignette of Muslim lore. It is the perfect mise-en-scene for his own biography, the story of a lifetime spent giving most the benefit of the doubt and many the benefit of his service.

For the last 36 years, ever since he opened his private practice at 106 Frederick Street, Ibrahim has served his clientele faithfully.

Today, the 66-year-old doctor's office has moved to 129 Henry Street but he still pays house calls throughout his niche market in the heart of Laventille's crime-ridden and gang-infested areas.

"I hear about Block 22, Snake Alley, all these things. They have a place called Hollywood too?" Ibrahim asked, listing some of Laventille's more notorious blocks. "I hear all these things but it doesn't matter. I go. The point is that people need someone and there's nobody else to do it. I feel that God has put me here to help."

"I don't know the criminals," he told the Sunday Express. "I don't know them. I don't know the gangs. But...many of their relatives...who are bed-ridden and who need someone to come and see them...I go and see them."

"My patients come from East Dry River, Belmont, Gonzales, John John, Laventille, Prizgar Lands, all these places," said the former head of the Anjuman Sunnat ul Jamaat Association (ASJA), whose leadership of that organisation was sandwiched between the Jamaat al Muslimeen's Yasin Abu Bakr-led attempted coup of July 27, 1990, and the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Ibrahim's decision to set up shop in this part of the country was not difficult.

"I come from that area," he explained. "I grew up there, I went to school there and when I came back from studies I went back to live there. I feel I belong there."

Recalling a childhood spent "playing cricket in the slums, in the plannings" and in Piccadilly Government Primary School, just opposite the Laventille Mosque, Ibrahim recalled how in 1957, at Progressive Education Institute, he got his Cambridge School Certificate and won a house scholarship to Queen's Royal College.

There, for two years, he prepared for the Cambridge Higher School Certificate exams. Then, in 1959, Ibrahim travelled to Scotland, returning to his Laventille home in 1965 as a certified medical practitioner. Later that year, Ibrahim would turn down an opportunity to pursue a lucrative career as a gynaecologist in Canada.

Among several photographs, certificates and awards on display in Ibrahim's Henry Street office is a Port of Spain Community Council "Behind the Bridge" plaque, awarded for his long-standing service to his clientele in the depressed and dangerous areas.

"The way I'm treated up there, it's as though I'm a king," he said humbly. "These people treat me so well. They respect me and I respect them."

While he acknowledged that his location in an Afro-Trinidadian population centre made his vocation all the more remarkable, the Indo-Trinidadian 'medicine man' said there was "no class distinction in Islam" and he saw himself as "doing the service of God".

"You do everything for God so whether...you black, white, yellow, it has nothing to do with it. We're all a family of God. This is what Islam is," he said.

Lamenting the drift in his profession away from family medicine and towards specialisation, Ibrahim described himself as one of "a dying breed".

"Many of the times you go and you don't get the current rate of remuneration, or the market value, but you go," he added, smiling. "Some of them say they'll pay you when they have money...You do not get your market value, but you do it, and I'm happy."