Deﬁning the Pedagogical Parameters of Islamic Bioethics

By the beginning of the 1980s, deliberations on Islam and biomedical ethics started to assume a systematised and collective form through combining contributions from Muslim religious scholars and (Muslim) biomedical scientists. The original idea was that biomedical scientists would inform and educate Muslim religious scholars about the scientific and biomedical aspects of specific bioethical issues. After being equipped with sufficient information about these technical aspects, religious scholars would embark upon their normative role by construing the religio-ethical Islamic standpoint. This proposed strict division between the tasks of biomedical scientists and those of religious scholars did not prove to be viable during the gatherings which hosted both groups. Instead of confining themselves to the informative role, biomedical scientists infringed upon the normative role which is typically assigned to Muslim religious scholars alone. Besides presenting technical information, they also presented their own perspectives on how Islamic scriptures should be employed in order to develop the Islamic religio-ethical standpoints. This article explains how biomedical scientists moved from being just “informants” for the religious scholars to becoming eventually “co-muftis”. 

Download Full-text

The Dilemmas of Islamic Bioethics in the Twenty-first Century

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajis.v28i1.346 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

pp. 45-75

Author(s):

Dr. Anke Iman Bouzenita

Keyword(s):

Brain Death ◽

Medical Care ◽

Case Studies ◽

Islamic Law ◽

Life Sciences ◽

First Century ◽

Islamic Bioethics ◽

Islamic World ◽

Twenty First Century

The current discourse on bioethical questions often reveals a certain patchiness or seeming inability to answer contemporary bioethical problems within an Islamic epistemological paradigm. Attempting to analyze the causes of this phenomenon, the author describes the decontextualization of Islamic concepts from a background of secularized medical care and the ethics in the Islamic world—as well as the estrangement due to these questions of Islamic law from its holistic framework of application as a pervasive phenomenon, which brought about the dilemmas of bioethics in the twenty-first century. The author discusses chosen bioethical case studies in this light, with a focus on the concept of brain death. Doing so, the author takes into consideration the paradigmatic relationship between science, bioethical models, and the implications of the relevant different worldviews. The author shows how constructed realities related to the life sciences have been imported from the secular setting into an already estranged Islamic context to be answered, and describes the evolving dilemmas that make Islamic bioethics appear like a stranger moving in a strange land.

Download Full-text