Muslims Healing Non-Muslims in L.A.

There’s a health clinic here in Los Angeles called, UMMA, which is run by a group of Muslims. It was started by a group of volunteers who wanted to help the city’s impoverished residents. Their efforts and clientele stem from a variety of ethnicities and faiths, making it a model of interreligious cooperation, yet the founders are motivated to do this specifically because of their own Islamic beliefs. According to the clinic’s executive director, “It’s a place to give and receive blessings, regardless of faith.”

It grew out of the 1992 [Rodney King - PV] riots, a vision by a small group of Muslim medical students to bring charitable, high-quality healthcare to the needy residents of South Los Angeles.

Eleven years later, the UMMA clinic on Florence Avenue has served nearly 20,000 patients, the great majority of them non-Muslim. It has become a mainstay of its largely low-income neighborhood, sponsoring blood drives, literacy promotions and even tax return workshops, along with its medical services.

And in an era when Middle Eastern conflicts and terrorist attacks have often brought uncomfortable attention to America’s Muslim communities, the clinic has become a source of considerable pride for Muslims in Southern California and nationwide.

Even before the riots left large sections of South Los Angeles devastated, the students had talked among themselves and with professors about starting a clinic, or at least a mobile healthcare unit that would circulate through low-income areas of the city to offer blood pressure exams and other services.

But after the riots, “we saw that there was such a huge need in South L.A.,” said Rushdi Abdul Cader, a clinic co-founder who was then just beginning his training as an emergency room physician. “It also was such a time of intolerance, with the city literally on fire.

“We wanted to do something to help, and also to start something that would promote better relations between people.”

The founders, who also included Abdul Cader’s wife, Nisha, now a pediatrician, were motivated by their Islamic faith, and by what they described as Prophet Muhammad’s call to try to correct whatever one finds wrong in the world.

From its earliest days, the clinic has been a model of interfaith cooperation, according to those involved. For instance, the man several of the founders described as their faculty mentor during their UCLA years, former UCLA professor Dr. Richard Usatine, jokes that he was the “Jewish advisor to their Muslim organization.”

A majority of the clinic’s board remains Muslim, but most of its staff members are non-Muslim, drawn from the community the clinic serves. Medical Director Dr. Steven Murphy is Roman Catholic.

Of the patients UMMA serves, about 98% are non-Muslim; about 70% are Latino and about 25% are African American, with the rest being Caucasian and Asian.

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