End-of-Life Care, Dying and Death in Islamic Ethics: A Primer

One of the main critiques directed to contemporary Islamic bioethical deliberations is that they are reduced to a juristic discourse which aims to simply judge certain medical interventions as either permissible (ḥalāl) or prohibited (ḥarām). Consequently, the critique continues, most of these deliberations would better fit into the so-called medical jurisprudence (fiqh ṭibbī), with very little to do with the broad discipline of ethics that aims to unravel and analyse the very process of moral reasoning (Sachedina 2008, 25–31; Sachedina 2009, 3–23; Sartell and Padela 2015, 756). In concurrence with this critique, I argue that Islamic bioethics should not operate as a sub-discipline of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) or a sub-category of fatwā-literature, sometimes called medical fatwās (fatāwā ṭibbiyya). Rather, it should function as a multidisciplinary field, where bioethical deliberations engage with relevant discussions in more than one discipline, depending on the type and scope of issues at hand and the questions to be examined. Thus, there is a need to move from a thin or monodisciplinary Islamic bioethical discourse, usually dominated by a fiqhī approach, to a thick and multidisciplinary discourse.