A tooth is created with four main layers: enamel, dentine, pulp chamber and cementum (the thin layer where the tooth attaches to the jaw). The hardest tissue of the body, the enamel is the protective, outermost layer of the tooth. Since it does not contain any living matter such as veins or nerves, we are not affected by hot, cold, sweet or sour stimulants via the tooth. If the Owner of an Everlasting Might and Compassion had not created the enamel of the tooth, which He placed at the entrance of the digestion room in the human palace, as he did, the variety of food we would eat would be very limited. Even slight contact with air would cause us great discomfort, and speaking or even opening our mouth would give us great pain.

The dentine, the hard layer just below the enamel, is a tissue sensitive to hot, cold, sweet and sour stimulants. As a reflection of the Creator’s Affection for His Creation, the dentine tissue is repaired when necessary by the restoring cells that he placed there.

The most inner part of the tooth is the organic part called the pulp chamber, which is filled with veins to protect the tooth from decay and feed it with necessary nutrients. Nerve cells in the soft pulp tissue play the greatest role in sensing the stimulants of heat, cold and pressure.

If we examine the anatomical structure of a tooth in detail, only then can we clearly see how it is perfectly equipped with wondrous and intelligent structures. However, are we really conscious of the duties of our teeth, placed in our jaws like pearls, in protecting our general health?

One of the main entrances to our bodies for microbes is the mouth. Because of this, maintaining healthy teeth and a clean mouth is very important in preventing diseases and maintaining a healthy life. When the mouth is not kept hygienic, a suitable environment is formed for the emergence of even very feeble microbes. In an unhygienic mouth, food residue accumulates and forms a bacterial plaque on the teeth. Using the glucose in this plaque, these bacteria produce acids. It is this acid that causes tooth decay and gum diseases.

Are we adequately informed about dental health and hygiene, a very important concept in preventive medicine? That Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, emphasized the importance of cleaning the mouth and teeth whenever one does his/her ablution and after every meal, grants a profundity of worship to God by keeping our teeth healthy.

Importance of Milk Teeth

Milk teeth start to appear in a baby’s gums after about the sixth month of age. The appearance of milk teeth differs from baby to baby according to factors like genetics, birth weight, socio-economics and nourishment level. By cutting a group of teeth every six months, all of the milk teeth appear by the age of 30 months. Between the 6th and 12th months the first incisors, between the 12th and 18th months the first molars, between the 18th and 24th months the first canines and between the 24th and 30th months the second molars erupt. Since the dentine tissue is not fully developed in this period, milk teeth are not at all resistant to decay. Since the pulp chamber is very soft and packed with blood vessels, it is very vulnerable to decay. Sucking fingers, excessive use of a pacifier, sucking or biting lips and gritting teeth all negatively affect the development of milk teeth. During the eruption of milk teeth, babies may have discomfort like itching gums, a need to bite something, excessive saliva secretion, watery eyes, lack of appetite, loss of weight, fever, bad temper and crying. In order to relieve these discomforts, the baby may be given something to chew on to relieve the pressure on the gums, and some cold drinks and cold food to soothe the pain.

As nothing in creation occurs devoid of wisdom, one may ask “What benefits are there after the discomforts when a baby’s milk teeth are coming in?” In other words, why are the milk teeth so important? Most of us do not give them enough care, because we think of them as temporary. The space occupied by the milk teeth is saved for the permanent teeth, and when the permanent tooth starts erupting, the milk tooth guides it into its proper place. If milk teeth are extracted too early, this alignment and spacing function of milk teeth cannot be performed, hence the permanent teeth may erupt in an improper way. Moreover, milk teeth provide proper chewing and correct vocal speech for the baby. When a baby develops unhealthy milk teeth, this may cause problems like poor facial appearance, and therefore some psychological disorders in the future. Untreated defects of milk teeth can cause pain, bad breath, difficulty in chewing, disorders in jaw development, malnutrition, aesthetic and general health problems like rheumatism and heart diseases.

Protection of Milk Teeth

Since tooth decay in babies’ teeth is very difficult to treat, preventive measures are much more important in looking after the milk teeth. Some of these measures are as follows;

• A baby must not allowed to sleep with A milk bottle in her/his mouth,

• Sugar, honey or any other sugary substance must never be added to baby’s milk,

• Baby must be given water after every feeding,

• After baby’s first teeth erupt, after every morning and evening meal, his teeth must be wiped with a soft, wet, clean towel,

• Give a soft learning toothbrush to the baby to play with.

A child must start using a toothbrush after his molars erupt, at the age of 2.5 to 3 years old. The size of the toothbrush should be suitable to the child’s mouth. It should be soft and made of nylon. Children can only brush the front of their teeth. Since the space between the teeth should also be cleaned to provide a shield against decay, parents should supervise their children when brushing their teeth. At this age, a child cannot brush his/her teeth properly, but the main aim to be achieved is for him/her to get into the habit of brushing teeth. Toothpaste may start to be used for the child after the age of three. We must not forget that the important thing for oral hygiene is not the toothpaste itself, but brushing the teeth properly and thoroughly. If these measures are not taken, or if it is already too late, any disorder in the milk teeth must be treated immediately without making the mistake of thinking the milk teeth will be replaced anyway.

Permanent Teeth

The first permanent teeth are the first big molars, which erupt when the child is about six years old. Between ages 7 and 9, the lower and upper incisors, between ages 9 and 10, the lower canines, between 10 and 12, the first and second small molars, between 11 and 12, the upper canines, between 12 and 13, the second big molars, and finally, between 17 and 21, the wisdom teeth, the third molars erupt. During the eruption of permanent teeth, some problems like distorted development may occur. Genetic factors, early loss of milk teeth, breathing disorders, untreated cavities between milk teeth and a mismatch of jaw and tooth sizes, may cause irregular development of teeth. The dental treatment practiced for aligning such irregular teeth is called ‘orthodontic treatment.’ Since irregularities of teeth form spaces suitable for the accumulation of food residue which allows microorganisms to increase and then leads to decay, orthodontic treatment should be done before the permanent teeth are firmly positioned. Irregular teeth may cause jaw-aches because of abnormal interlacing of upper and lower teeth.

There are different thoughts about whether the wisdom teeth should be pulled out or not. Wisdom teeth are placed at the furthest back part of the jaw curvature. This part of the mouth is very suitable for food residue and microorganisms to accumulate. Because of this, wisdom teeth are very vulnerable to decay. In addition, any decay in these teeth may also affect the adjacent molars. If a positive result will not be achieved from treatment, these teeth can then be pulled out. However, if the wisdom teeth will erupt correctly into their places and do not negatively affect the surrounding tissues, and if there is sufficient space for them in the jaws, it is definitely beneficial for them to stay.

Another tooth problem that seems to concern today’s aesthetic conscious individuals is the color of teeth. However, tooth color is completely a personal phenomenon, like eye or skin color. But still, we must know that some external factors, like tea, coffee, smoking, feeding habits and tooth injuries, and some internal factors, like genetic attributes and aging, may also affect the color of the teeth.

What should we do to obtain Dental Health?

Mouth and tooth hygiene is an important issue that was emphasized strongly by Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, and the most effective method he used was brushing the teeth. However, after eating acidic foods or drinking acidic drinks like fruit juice, fruits, soft drinks or fizzy drinks, you should wait for about 30 minutes, because the dental enamel will be softer and more sensitive just after consuming such foods and drinks and if you brush straightaway, you may rub the acid into the enamel tissue of your teeth. You can clean the residues of acidic foods and drinks by rinsing your mouth with water or a fluoride based mouth rinse.

Having a healthy mouth and teeth mainly depends upon applying a good brushing technique to the teeth and gums. By applying the brush in a circular manner, you should always start brushing the gums towards the teeth, then the outer surfaces and finish with all inner surfaces. You must avoid damaging the masticator surfaces by applying too much force. Brushing the teeth twice a day at least is necessary to prevent the formation of bacterium plaque.

In order to achieve ideal hygiene for your teeth, you should also use dental floss for cleaning between the teeth. This will help to clean places where a brush cannot reach and thus prevent dental plaque. Also, special mouth rinses may be used in order to provide an effective general cleanliness.

Toothpicks can also be used between the teeth. While they are cheaper, they cannot provide a hygiene as comprehensive as dental floss, since they are thicker than floss. When using toothpicks, you should choose those with blunted tips to prevent any inflammation of the gums. Food residue that has stayed too long between the teeth should not be swallowed, since large amount of harmful microorganisms may grow on it.

In elderly people, due to a lack of sufficient calcium, disorders like gum retraction and wobbly teeth may occur. For people who have lost their teeth completely, because of osteolysis of the lower jaw, dental prostheses may not fit properly in the jaw. During this time of life, extra calcium intake should be provided by following a calcium-rich diet.

With age, the amount of calcium also decreases in the body. In relation to this situation, teeth also become more fragile. Using the teeth to break open nuts may cause cracks that cannot be seen with the eye, which may later cause fractures in the teeth. Therefore, we must never use our teeth to break hard foods, such as nuts, at any age, and we must be careful about breaking teeth, especially during old age.

This time, with your permission, I won’t be talking about the last two weeks that I have spent in this alien city, as I usually do. Instead, I feel obliged to reflect on your anger at the fact that your father did not use the opportunity he had during his youth to become a medical doctor. What I’m going to tell you has been said by many great thinkers in the past, but I want to bring their words up-to-date and relate them to my studies here. I hope to give you an alternative understanding of tolerance by using the idea of networks.

As commonly defined, networks are web-like maps of nodes that represent entities and links that connect the nodes and represent their interactions. Networks have become very popular these days, and are used to analyze everything from ecology and biochemistry to social infrastructures.

Try to visualize your father 30 years ago in a large network that consisted of his two brothers and three sisters, his fiance of 2 years standing, maybe a very close friend who had recently died, maybe another friend who already had had a child, along with the fear of leaving his hometown for the first time, and so on. All of us, including your father, are surrounded by such factors all the time. Perhaps your father could have overcome some of them, like his fear of loneliness or impatience, but he certainly could not have overcome all of them, because his family, surrounding events, and many other factors existed on their own and didn’t develop according to your father’s will.

Upon further reflection, however, maybe none of these factors, even the trivial ones, were ever in his grasp and thus were never under his control. Let’s think back even further. When your father was in the womb, he had only one obvious link with the world: his mother. But wait a minute, you might ask, didn’t he have other links, such as his genes, family, and birthplace? Of course, you would agree that your father had no choice in any of these crucial factors. Moreover, I don’t think that it’s hard to accept that, for example, his impatience was probably the result of his cultural make-up, genes, interactions with his family members, and other things. As you know, all of these were independent of your father’s will. Thus, your father, and indeed every person, was born into a predetermined world, one in which most choices had already been made for him. Moreover, these initial determinations had an undeniable impact upon the rest of his life and decisions.

Imagine a circle in the center of a big picture. The circle is you, and the picture represents your life, or else all of the interactions that you make during your life. As mentioned above, even in the very beginning, that circle is not unique. Now imagine a few more circles which represent your family members and hometown, and draw a line from each circle to yourself. This is you in the beginning. Without a doubt, soon some circles will fade away and other circles will appear in a continuously regenerating network. Let this little human being live in this world (morph his network, as we say) for some years and, in the end, you’ll obtain a dreadfully complex picture that is almost impossible to understand.

Nevertheless, let’s consider for a moment the evolution of this self-network. At each decision point, we make a choice that is influenced by our personal self-network, defined as a collection of those choices over which we had no control and those which we made due to our personal network at that time. This recursive definition of self, which is entirely reasonable, makes it impossible for us to judge other people’s behavior, for we can never know if such behavior is the result of free will or of the previous self-network. We find it easy to criticize students who drop out of school, or behave anti-socially, or sleep all day. But maybe they had no other option in the context of their self-network. If this is the case, criticizing them is almost like criticizing a fish because it cannot fly. It is quite possible that no alternative choices were within their reach.

The key observation lies in this: When we see a person do something that we don’t like, we don’t know and can never know how much his or her self-network has influenced that specific act. Therefore, my friend, who are we to judge other people’s acts unless we have this kind of knowledge? Given this, if we want to be true to ourselves, what other alternative do we have but to exercise complete tolerance toward others?

Before going on, however, I should stress that I am talking about tolerance for acts that don’t violate other people’s rights and freedoms. In addition, I’m talking about personal tolerance only, for obviously everyone must follow the law for the sake of society. For example, a thief should be punished according to the law. Therefore, given that there are many underlying reasons for a person’s act, we should hesitate before passing judgment, for it benefits both of us if we are tolerant. As shown above, this is not only a more pragmatic, but also a more rational approach.

The world’s great religions and great minds have said such things many times. For example, we read in the Bible: Judge not, that ye be not judged (Matthew 7:1) and Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whoseoever thou art that judgest… (Romans 2:1). The great Hellenistic philosopher Epictetus says: If a man drinks much wine, do not say that he drinks badly, but that he drinks much. For till you have decided what judgment prompts him, how do you know that he acts badly? 1 Even more, another Biblical verse states: Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God. (I Corinthians 4:5). This verse supports tolerance, for it tells us that we should have comprehensive knowledge of a person before judging their acts. Such knowledge, as we all know, is possessed only by God.

An interesting result of considering individuals as nodes located in the center of a complex network occurs when we try to influence a person’s views, acts, and beliefs. In order to appreciate how difficult (if not impossible) this is, imagine the self-network of the person you want to influence, with all of his or her beliefs, memories, friends, as well as all of the nodes acquired while morphing his or her self-network.

Now imagine the fraction of nodes in that self-network that are directly related to you. I don’t think that you’ll claim to be a big part of that person’s life, unless both of you have been on intimate terms for quite a while. The proportion of the nodes that you represent in his or her self-network can be quite an accurate measure of how much influence you will have. For example, you can alter a lonely or a simple person’s beliefs in a shorter time, since in a short time you can become a large proportion of his or her self-network.

By the way, you might be amazed to hear that the English mathematician Thomas Bayes (1702-61) tried to formulate quantitatively how a person’s beliefs would change upon receiving new information that contradicts his or her previous beliefs. In a Bayesian analysis, a set of experiences (in our case, links) are seen as something that influences opinion and decision. I won’t discuss this further, however, since it’s beyond both my and this letter’s scope.

In my opinion, the reason why we almost always criticize and blame others, and constantly see faults in everybody else is because we refuse to make an honest self-criticism; that is to consider our own responsibilities, not those of other people.

Forgive me for saying this, but you want to achieve a better quality of life now; this is something for which you have to work really hard. Yet, if your father had become a doctor, you probably would already be living this better life, and so you wouldn’t have to push yourself. Hence, we can find a convenient scapegoat in your father, who, for whatever reason, didn’t set you up with such a life!

Another example, one in the future, might be that a person explains his/her beliefs in the hope of influencing someone else. Unable to convince this person, he/she blames that person for not opening their heart and really listening. Easy, isn’t it? However, remember that you can’t really influence a person if you are not a large part of his or her life.

Do you see what’s missing in this picture? Reality and, more than that, a solution. It lacks reality, for we can never hold someone absolutely responsible for anything. And why not? Because we have no way of knowing which actions were based upon free-will and which ones were the result of his or her prior self-network. By blaming others, regardless of whether we are correct in doing so or not, we not only contradict reality, we also ignore our own mistakes, closing the roads to a solution that could come from ourselves, and taking a passive position of stagnancy that, I think, won’t make a better world for ourselves or anybody else.

Before ending, I’d like to apologize if some of my words sound harsh. However, I consider you a true friend who will appreciate my openness. Even if some of my words have upset you, perhaps you’ll be patient with me. For this to be, before blaming me, stop for a moment and try to look at this situation from another perspective. Try to find some truth in my words, and try to be hard on yourself. Below are some extraordinarily beautiful lines from Nietzsche, which I think are appropriate to our discussion. He writes:

Why so hard? the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. After all, are we not close kin?

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be the destined inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem bliss to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax, bliss to write on the will of millennia as on bronze harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!2

Yes my friend, become hard, very hard on yourself; and soft, very soft towards others.

Footnotes

1 Epictetus, The Discourses of Epictetus, tr. P. E. Matheson (New York: Heritage Press, [1968]).

2 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann (USA: Viking Penguin, 1966), 214.