When Sister Luke, in "The Nun's Story", tells her Mother Superior that she can no longer keep her vows, the Reverend Mother Emanuel says "You entered the convent to be a nun. Your love of God must be greater than your love of medicine". To which, because her love of God isn't as great as her love of being a nurse, Sister Luke has no real response.
Now we've got a bunch of doctors whose love of God--however odd that love, or that God, may be--is definitely greater than their love of medicine, and everyone seems shocked by the arrests made in the last few days of the Moslem doctors who tried to set off several car bombs in the UK.
Several generations ago, among immigrant families, largely Jewish, in the US, having a son become a doctor was just about the most precious dream out there (yes, women too, but to a much lower degree--the young lady should marry a doctor). Even today, among Asian immigrants it is a big thing. Why? For the mitzvah aspect? Or for the status aspect? To be a doctor shows that you've got intelligence--or that, at any rate, you've got enough smarts to master the curriculum (the obverse being the assumption that if you are in a skilled trade you aren't really very smart at all), that you are due respect because you have the power to save life in an almost magical way (and to the uneducated, it really is magical), and that, in the West, at least, you make a good income, and having that MD (and maybe some more initials after your name as well) give you a passport into the institutions of the rich and often the famous. The opinions of doctors carry more weight, even when discoursing on subjects remote from medicine, than the average joe. Don't ask me why. I know some doctors who are excellent physicians but absolutely clueless otherwise. Some of them are in the US Congress, for example.
None of this has anything to do with vocation, or with being a good, decent, moral human being. One has only to look at various medical publications that offer reams of advice on managing one's practice for maximum efficiency and profit to see that being a doctor is a business to a certain degree, sometimes big business, and for some doctors, it may be far more a business than a way to serve suffering humanity.
So why should those UK doctor-wannabe-terrorists be any different? Add to the mix the fact that they probably are vulnerable to a kind of subtle racism (Is Dr. Mahmoud really as good as Dr. Jones?) because they come from the "third world" and who knows what kind of education they got back in the boondocks/jungle/desert? "Can't you give me an appointment with a doctor who speaks English?" (Even when the doctor in question may speak better English than the patient). They are tolerated, rather than accepted, whereas, back in their original countries (or countries from which their families came) they would be looked up to as gods (if not on a level with Allah, peace and blessings be upon Him). How easy to turn the paranoia and feelings of inferiority into a desire to annihilate those who are really the inferiors if one only interprets the Koran in a certain way.
It's been noted that a large number of suicide bombers in our intifadas came from relatively well-educated middle class Palestinian backgrounds and they should have "known better" than to fall for the extremist propaganda. But that is exactly what makes them vulnerable: they don't know who they are. They can't identify with the peasants, they've left them behind, but they don't belong with the Western cultures they long to adopt. So, with the zeal of converts, they construct an ideal world which isn't tainted with "foreign" values (but which never really existed--A Thousand Nights and a Night is as realistic as A Fiddler on The Roof) and decide they must "re-establish" something that never was.
One hopes that, on the wards at least, these doctors had a better grasp of reality. They are really rather pathetic.
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