He's amazed that a Muslim could become a doctor, next he'll be telling you those doctors are good role models for the third world.
Yeah, but there a many Muslims who are doctors. If someone comes from an Arab, Desi, or Persian background and isn't either a doctor, engineer, or something that's 'professional', then their family is going to "raise hell" about it.
So I don't understand why you,
SirJosephPorter, would put an emphasis on a Muslim being a doctor; I guess either you were innocently using it to describe your friend, or it was a sort of Freudian slip, showing that you don't know that much about Muslims at all.
Edit: I don't think that's quite correct,
Scott Free. The countries with the highest birthrates in the world are often the poorest ones. So that proves that people who can't afford to have kids still do, but they often end up dying younger than those in wealthy or developing countries do, due to lack of proper healthcare, and poverty in general. In Islam, there is the concept of 'rizq' (transliterated Arabic word), in which Muslims put their faith in Allah Ta 'Ala to provide for them and their families. Doing anything to kill children, babies, or even unborn fetuses is prohibited (except in cases of the pregnancy threatening the mother's life - but the fetus has to be less than 40 days old, which is the point at which the soul is breathed into the body). Many Muslims take this seriously, but not necessarily all those who immigrate to the West. Many people who call themselves Muslim who immigrate to Canada alone are very secular in their mindset, so the warning from the Qur'an to avoid avoiding children would not weigh heavily on their minds.