The first Islamic Medical Conference on May 1 and 2 was organised by the Jamatud Dawah's department of Khidmat-i-Khalq and held at the Jamia Masjid al-Qadsia in Lahore, the new headquarters of the Jamatud Dawah.

Jamatud Dawah's department of Khidmat-i-Khalq has been quite active over the last couple of years. In addition to providing medical assistance, it is implementing a large number of social welfare projects such as digging wells and providing stitching machines to widows around the country. Its monthly budget during the last 14 months has averaged more than Rs 3.5 million, almost twice as much as it was spending previously, the official sources of the Jamat claim.

The ad-Dawah Medical Mission is Khidmat-i-Khalq department's most important project. Jamatud Dawah, or its predecessor Markaz Dawat wal Irshad, has always been interested in providing medical facilities to the poor. It founded the Taiba Hospital in Muzaffarabad in the early 1990s to provide medical assistance to the needy, including refugees from the Occupied Kashmir. The hospital has grown to be a 26-bed hospital. According to official sources of the Markaz, around 9,000 outdoor patients visit this hospital every month to get free of cost or very inexpensive medical support. In spite of being a charity, it is considered to be the best private hospital in Azad Kashmir.

The Jamatud Dawah also founded another hospital at the Markaz Taiba in Muridke. The official figures of the Markaz claim that around 2,000 students study at the Taiba Educational Complex at the Markaz Taiba in Muridke. Every month, around 6,000 patients get free of cost or inexpensive medical support from this hospital, the sources claim. A new building to house a 100-bed hospital is being built at Muridke.

In an exclusive interview with this correspondent, Chairman of the ad-Dawah Medical Mission, Hafiz Abdur Raoof said that the ad-Dawah Medical Mission is also spending more than Rs 5 million on running some 60 dispensaries around the country. More than 350,000 patients are treated at these dispensaries each year. It holds mobile medical camps in the regions where there are no dispensaries. More than 77,000 patients have benefited from these medical camps in places like the Northern Areas, Tharparkar in Sindh, Makran in Balochistan, and the refugee camps of the Afghan and Kashmiri refugees. It has also set up a blood bank. The ad-Dawah ambulance service has provided free or inexpensive service to more than 10,500 patients in ten cities. It also provides wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, and artificial limbs to Afghan and Kashmiri refugees.

According to Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the department of Khidmat-i-Khalq is planning to expand its area of operations even outside the country. "It has already sent relief goods worth 1.88 million to the Iranian city of Bam after an earthquake hit it. It has been sending relief goods and meat of the sacrificial animals to Afghanistan and Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It offered to send relief goods to help the people in Bhoj in the Indian Gujrat after an earthquake devastated the region but the Indian government declined the offer. It is currently planning to extend its relief operations to the stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh in the coming months," he said.

The basic objective of the first Islamic Medical Conference was to extend dawat to the medical community of Pakistan to join the Jamatud Dawah in its mission of khidmat-i-khalq. Hafiz Abdur Raoof further said that the participating doctors and medical students can further the mission of the ad-Dawah Medical Mission by working for just for one hour at any one of the ad-Dawah medical hospitals and dispensaries.

The doctors are not supposed to offer treatment for bodily ills; they also offer dawat to all their patients. They ask their Muslim patients to become better Muslims and non-Muslim patients to convert to Islam. There is no apparent coercion as the provision of medical assistance is not conditional on accepting the dawat of the ad-Dawah Medical Mission. The mission of dawat is time-consuming and demands perseverance. Once the doctors or the medical students show their willingness, the Jamatud Dawah would train the willing doctors and medical students on how to perform dawat.

Like in other sectors, the Jamatud Dawah has been active among medical students. It offers weekly daroos to the students in many medical colleges of the country. The association these students build with the Jamatud Dawah as students continues forever in most of the cases. For instance, Dr Ahmed Daud, an eye specialist and the vice-chairman of the Ad-Dawah Medical Mission became associated with the Markaz Dawat wal Irshad when he was a student at the Allama Iqbal Medical College in Lahore. He never wavered in his commitment to the mission of the Jamatud Dawah since then.