Winterport, ME

Monday, January 25, 2010

Optimize Your Life!

Preface: Worldwide Arabic Edition by Jarir of Saudi Arabia

It is a privilege and honor to write the preface to the Arabic Edition of Optimize Your Life! , a book series that has become our international best-seller, touching the lives of countless people throughout the world.

I was born and raised in a suburb of New York City, in a cosmopolitan environment of immigrants and their descendants from throughout the world. They shared their culture, religion, values, wisdom, and especially their food. As a son of Norwegian immigrants, this was an ideal world for an energetic young man with a "yearning burning for learning."

While my formal education was focused largely on Western traditions, Arabic and Islamic scholars played important roles. As a science major in High School we studied the works of Alhazen (Ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Hytham), The Physicist, as we were introduced to the scientific method. As the Father of Modern Optics he was a part of our world as we studied light, lenses, and the camera obscura.

At Wheaton College ( Illinois) as a chemistry major I reveled in the extended works of Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan ), the Father of Chemistry. At Wheaton I also earned a minor degree in Biblical Studies, which focused on the Judeo-Christian transitions, but had an opportunity to study Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.

At Cornell University Medical College in New York City the world of the polymath Islamic scholars opened up with great vigor. These physician-scholars, like Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and Rhazes (Muhammed ibn Zakariya Razi) collected and applied the wisdom of medicine of India, Persia, Greece, and Rome and then made their own contributions and advances, and shared them though their voluminous treatises. Avicenna was of particular interest since he had been a child prodigy, mastered the widest possible ranges of sciences and philosophy of his time, and became known as the Father of Modern Medicine. He also noted that: "medicine is not one of the difficult sciences." Perhaps, not for him.

At the University of Vermont, where I completed a residency in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the works of Ibn Zuhr (Abdal-Malik ibn Zuhr) in dissection and autopsies were presented. During my government service obligation as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Center for Disease Control (Atlanta) we revisited a number of Islamic scholars who had advanced knowledge in contagious diseases, quarantine, and epidemiology, like Avicenna and Rahzes. In addition there was Ibn Al-Khatis and Ibn Khatima who presented ideas of contagion and the Black Death.

In 1972 I was finished with my formal training and at the tender age of 33 was chosen as Chief of Pathology at a medical center in New England. It was an opportunity of a lifetime and I focused all my energies on that massive project.

Twenty-five years later, I took early retirement from the practice. I entered a new world of the luxury of reading, traveling, and writing articles, books, and treatises on what I had learned "in the trenches" of the practice of medicine, as well as other ventures. In 2003 we published Optimize Your Life! The One-page Strategic Planner that merges personal and organizational strategic planning, which are one in the same. Subsequently we published an edition complete with a CD of the Worksheets and licensed editions in Korea, India, Japan, Mainland China, and for a worldwide Spanish edition by Random House, the world's largest publisher.

During this time I was able to revisit my studies of the major religions of the world including Islam. Of specific interest has been what some call The Golden Age of Islam (750 to 1258…perhaps much later), where I became enchanted by the numerous polymaths, the scholars with the widest training and interests possible. They were students and masters of the agriculture, arts, astronomy, economics, industry, literature, jurisprudence, medicine, navigation, philosophy, sciences, sociology, and theology. It was centuries later that, in the West, the term "Renaissance men" was coined to describe such scholars of wide interests and talents.

As I wrote Optimize Your Life! the works of ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, played a key role in creating and presenting my message. It soon became evident that Islamic scholars, like Averroes, had collected, preserved, and advanced the works of these philosophers and then introduced them to the West. These works became the basis for the universities in the West, for scholasticism, that lasted for over four centuries.

Islamic scholars play a continuing role in influencing other scholars from throughout the world. The Greek philosopher Aristotle influenced the Islamic scholar Averroes, who in turn, influenced Thomas Aquinas, the controversial Christian theologian. I must admit that I could spend the rest of my life just studying and applying the works of these three, my AAA scholars.

Bernhoff A. Dahl, M.D.

President

Trionics International, Inc.

Winterport, ME

207-223-9998