Islamic signposts

research > listening post

ISLAMIC SIGNPOSTS

AT THE RESEARCH CENTER FOR ISLAMIC LEGISLATION AND ETHICS, THE WORK BEING CARRIED OUT IS AS MUCH ABOUT WEIGHING CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT AGAINST ISLAMIC PRINCIPLES AS IT IS ABOUT ERECTING MORAL SIGNPOSTS ALONG THE UNRELENTINGLY, AND SOMETIMES FRANTIC, PATH OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 34 > QATAR TODAY >NOVEMBER 2015

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ducation City has no shortage of inspiring buildings – and the EC mosque is especially so. One would expect that getting in touch with one’s spiritual side would come easy for those inside its hallowed walls. There is a certain quality in the air that bids you to ponder higher things.

Unsurprisingly, it is the home of the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies and the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE). We are there to meet CILE’s Academic Director Dr Mohammed Ghaly, who also specialises in Islamic biomedical ethics. In an engaging hour-long discussion, he tells us how the centre is working towards filling in gaps in knowledge about the Islamic perspective on the modern sciences.

“CILE has identified 12 fields where a vision for Islamic ethics is necessary to create a link between modern sciences and Islam – ranging from media and bioethics to economics and political science,” Dr Ghaly says. “These fields have developed enormously in the last century outside the Islamic tradition; we were not part of what was going on in these sciences and today they shape our lives. Now we need to address them. We believe Islamic thought can enrich the discussions on the discourse on ethics in all these fields.” While as academic director Dr Ghaly oversees all the research that happens at CILE, he speaks most passionately about Islamic bioethics.

There are two dimensions to his work: first, identifying and changing what must be changed (as opposed to what can’t be changed) and second, and more importantly, making the discourse more accessible to the people with the religious and cultural background unique to the region. “For instance, organ donation is acceptable worldwide for a variety of reasons but we can’t use the same reasoning here. Islamic ethics has its own vocabulary and its own models of reasoning.” This has meant studying how Islamic scholars have addressed medical ethics in the past and finding a better way to do it.

Modern Islamic bioethics “In the West, biomedical ethics are significantly advanced – the technologies were born there and so they started earlier.

We were the receivers. First it shocked us and we rejected everything; then the march of progress meant we had to accept everything and now we are trying to

FAITH AND THE RESEARCHER

“Not all of the few people who are currently working on Islamic bioethics are Muslims – some just have respect and wonder for Islam.

For them it is a scholarly inquiry into how to reconcile this huge tradition with modern science.”

reach a middle ground; it all takes time.

Contemporary Islamic bioethics is an emerging field. Until the 80s we had been approaching bioethical issues like any other issue in the life of a Muslim – prayers, fasting, pilgrimage – but this proved to be problematic. In these other cases, you could check the sources and manuals of Islamic jurisprudence and come up with an answer. But how do you find out what Islam says about cloning or IVF? You can look but you are not going to find any direct answers,” he says. Which is why today, Islamic bioethics research has two parts – informative and normative. “First you should have information about the issue and then you go look for the norms in your sources.” But religious scholars addressing the issue in isolation had an inherent problem with the very first step of the process – the informative – due to limited or no background in biology or science, their education largely restricted to religious texts. “So their knowledge about the theme of the questions was almost non existent. They could be the most accomplished scholars but if they didn’t know what was being talked about, their answers could very well be wrong.

This created a problem in the 70s-80s with the outright rejection of issues like birth control, contraceptives, organ transplant, etc. It became clear that this traditional way of addressing the questions on medical ethics was not working.”

The solution was to address them collectively, in two senses. First, making it interdisciplinary and involving biomedical scientists, and then making it democratic, by expanding the discussion to groups of scientists sitting with groups of scholars.

“The questions raised are so sophisticated that there is no one way of understanding and answering the questions,” Dr Ghaly explains. This has served the purpose well and several councils based in the Gulf and outside, having discussed almost all the standard bioethical questions that are to

THE RISK OF SUBJECTIVITY AND THE IVF CASE STUDY “YES, SUBJECTIVITY IS AN ISSUE, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE TOPIC IS BEING DISCUSSED FOR THE FIRST TIME. WHEN THE ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS SCHOLARS FIRST STARTED TALKING ABOUT IN VITRO FERTILIZATION (IVF), THEY WERE SHOCKED; THEY COMPLETELY REJECTED IT BECAUSE THEY FELT BEING CONCEIVED IN A TEST TUBE OR A PETRI DISH VIOLATED THE DIGNITY OF A CHILD. THEY ALSO SAID PROCREATION WAS RELATED TO SEXUAL INTERCOURSE AND IVF WILL MARGINALISE THE INTIMACY BETWEEN COUPLES. BUT LATER, AS THE COLLECTIVE DISCUSSIONS STARTED HAPPENING, WE DIDN’T SEE THESE ARGUMENTS RESURFACE. IT WAS DECIDED THAT IT IS ACCEPTABLE IN PRINCIPLE AS LONG AS IT’S BETWEEN A MARRIED COUPLE. AND THAT’S HOW IT’S BEEN DONE FOR THE LAST 30 YEARS EVEN THOUGH MOST COUNTRIES DON’T HAVE ANY SPECIFIC LAWS ABOUT THIS. WHEN I STARTED STUDYING ABOUT GENOMICS, SOME OF THE PROCEDURES INVOLVING INSERTING HUMAN GENES INTO LAB ANIMALS WERE QUITE SHOCKING. LATER YOU CALM DOWN AND BETTER UNDERSTAND THE DETAILS. THAT’S HOW YOU MINIMIZE SUBJECTIVITY – AN INFORMED AND COLLECTIVE APPROACH.”

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research > listening post

NOT JUST AN IMPORT

“I have noticed that much of the legislation in this region is influenced by that in the US and Europe and it has similar inhibitions though they aren’t necessary. For instance, according to the Islamic tradition is it perfectly acceptable to conduct research on a human embryo until it is 40 days old, before it is thought to be ensouled." So stem cell research might not be as controversial here as it is elsewhere.

be found in western bioethical literature, coming up with appropriate resolutions.

There is rich material and an impressive list of publications. But this continues to be less than ideal.

“Till now we have been addressing issues piecemeal, repeating the process for each distinct topic. But the informative part is continually being updated. The advances in biomedical tech are producing sophisticated ethical questions every day and we need a consistent way to deal with these. Which is what we are working on at CILE – building a methodological framework and zeroing in on the guiding principles that can help us address any issue systematically,” he says.

Islam and the cultural identity Dr Ghaly can’t point out exactly why he was attracted to the esoteric field of Islamic biomedical ethics. “After I finished my studies in Egypt, I went to the Netherlands.

There, at Leiden University, I worked on how Islam says we should treat the elderly, and then those with disabilities. When I was doing my doctorate on the latter, I was writing a chapter on medical treatment for disabilities and realised that this field needed some work. I received a grant to 36 > QATAR TODAY >NOVEMBER 2015

work on the interplay of bioethics and Islam in the West,” he says. “I remember in Leiden, our professors told us that when they were students in the 60s, their teachers told them they would probably be the last ones to be studying religious perspectives on bioethics. That they were here switch off the lights. That this was going to be the end of religion and everything was going to be secularised. But this hasn’t come to pass. Religion will never be irrelevant; but in some societies it’ll be more central than in others.”

Having spent most of his academic career in Europe, we ask Dr Ghaly if he finds himself working or thinking differently now that he is studying the same things but from the heart of the Islamic world.

“In the Netherlands, Islamic bioethics was hardly needed. Now we speak in terms of global ethics because these questions are global in nature. Of course, it can’t be truly global without taking world religions like Islam into consideration. And when I taught in the faculties of medicine and biology, physicians wanted to know how to handle certain issues with their Muslim patients. But here there is an added value – it is extremely significant to the local moral world. In bioethics, the most important element in making decisions related to biomedical technology is how it fits into everyone’s own local moral world that each person consults when making difficult decisions. The composition of this world at the individual and societal level is very

complicated. When we speak of the Muslim world, particularly the Arab world and even more particularly the Gulf, religion is a very significant part of the local moral world and important to the identity of the person. In Qatar today there is a huge drive to import the most advanced biomedical technology and be at the forefront of medicine, but we are as concerned about the compatibility of these technologies with the cultural and religious identities of the society.

So the demand for an Islamic bioethical perspective to check these technologies is higher than in the West where it is merely an ethical issue and not also concerned with identity. Here there will be a strong backlash from society if some therapy is found to be contradictory to Islamic principles. In fact, the team working on the genomics project says they are grappling more with the ethical than the scientific part.”

For Dr Ghaly, and the team he will be putting together in the near future to study the compatibility of Islamic principles with genome research, this is a lot of pressure. Complicated questions about active research for which there are no quick answers. “While CILE has received an award from Qatar National Research Fund to study this, we will need at least three years for well-constructed, informed answers. Genomics has been discussed and approved in principle before by scholars.

Now we have to prioritise issues and delve into the details – editing the genes, using animal embryos – and also work on the general framework.”

A question of authority CILE currently is concentrating on a handful of the dozen issues on its agenda, all the while putting together the team.

Over the last three years they have done extensive work on bioethics, political ethics, migration and human rights. There are three ways they disseminate their research. “Our research is directed to the scientific/academic elite of the world who want to know what Islam says about a certain subject; I work closely with Qatar Biobank who are leading the Qatar Genome Project. Then we also target what is known as the educated public – PhDs and Masters students; we give lectures on several campuses in Education City and Qatar University. Thirdly, we talk directly to the general public through public lectures, blogs, articles, etc,” he says. In Qatar, Dr Ghaly works with almost all stakeholders.

“On an administrative level we are

THE WESTERN LEAD

“There are people who believe we can just borrow from Western bioethics. But Islam is rich, diverse and deep enough to produce answers which will renew these fields themselves and help them grow further.”

represented in the Institutional Review Boards at Hamad and Weill Cornell. No research involving human subjects can happen without approval from these IRBs, which are made up of scientists and ethicists. On the legislative level, we have close collaborations with the Supreme Council of Health and have participated in committee working on drafting a law governing conducting research on human subjects, a pioneering law in the Muslim world.”

Does he think that there are/might be some issues where Islam might be at odds with progressive thought, similar to how the Catholic Church is fighting abortions?

“We don’t have a binding authority in Islam and there hasn’t been one since the Prophet who received divine revelation. So all that religious scholars are doing is exerting their utmost efforts to discover divine law – what would God have said about this issue?

That’s why in Islamic law we speak in terms of probabilities. And no one group of people has the right to speak about Islam and this has never been the case anytime in history.

So the only body that can speak about Islam is the society, and the religious scholar who gets the most support from the society will represent Islam. The very internal structure of Islamic authority will not allow it to end up like the Catholic Church.”

“As a state you might create an Islamic authority who has control of the religion in your state, but all you’re doing is isolating the body and its followers from the mainstream. It’s a disservice to the group. Even in Shia Islam, the [Ayatollah] Khomeini has authority only over political issues and not necessarily religious ones.

There are instances where his views on medical issues like IVF were not followed when drafting legislation because he was in the minority. So in Islam, while you might have to consult an authority, you also have the right to choose that authority.”

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