Physician · Epidemiologist · Writer

Medicine is never only medicine.

I write about medicine, war, belief, memory, and the changing human condition in the Arab world — where epidemiology meets history, and care meets meaning.

A new book, 2026 →
New · Forthcoming 2026

Widows & Orphans

When War Shatters Health Systems in the Arab World

A work of narrative public health and moral witness. Widows & Orphans traces how war fractures the health of a region — not only through destroyed hospitals and broken care, but through the quieter devastation of grief, displacement, widowhood, and orphanhood. Blending epidemiology, history, and human story, it asks what remains of care when systems collapse.

Forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing · 2026

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The Books

Bread & Breath

How food, air, water, heat, dust, and climate shape human health across the Arab world — and what environmental change means for the future of survival.

Under review

Home & Horizon

Mental health, meaning, and modern life — the psychological transitions reshaping Arab societies: family, faith, loneliness, migration, identity, and the search for meaning in an age of rapid change.

In progress

Why Do Patients Like Traditional Healers?

Part memoir, part public-health inquiry — trust, healing, and the enduring place of traditional medicine, seen through a childhood as the son of a traditional healer and a later life as a physician.

In progress

The Body in Fiqh

An anatomical and physiological primer for students of Islamic law — a bridge between medicine and jurisprudence on fasting, menstruation, embryology, illness, and the human body.

In progress
Research in Development

The Epidemiology of Misunderstanding · The Hadith Atlas — a statistical reading of the tradition

The Newsletter

The Threshold

Essays on medicine, society, belief, memory, and public health — especially where they meet, and complicate one another, in the Arab world.

Subscribers are the first to know when Widows & Orphans is published.

  • Medicine and meaning
  • War and health
  • Faith and the body
  • Mental health and modernity
  • Tradition and trust
  • The epidemiology of misunderstanding
About
Yahya M. Al-Farsi, physician and writer, Muscat

Muscat, Oman

Shaped by both the traditional and modern worlds of healing.

Yahya M. Al-Farsi is an Omani physician, epidemiologist, and writer whose work explores the intersections of medicine, society, faith, and memory. He is Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology at Sultan Qaboos University, and has held academic affiliations with Boston University, Imperial College London, and other international institutions.

Born in Oman and shaped by both the traditional and modern worlds of healing, his writing moves between public health, war, mental health, environmental change, and the human search for meaning. The work is grounded in science but deeply attentive to culture, belief, and lived experience.

He writes from Muscat, Oman.