End-of-life care and organ donation are two thorny issues for many Muslims and will be tackled at the first Islamic medicine conference held in Australia this weekend.
The conference will see a gathering of more than 300 Muslim healthcare professionals to discuss key challenges in their sector.
Sheikh Dr. Rafāqat Rashid, a highly-respected Shari`ah scholar and London-based general practitioner, will address the conference on end-of-life care, ABC News reported.
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Co-founder of the Al Balagh Academy in the United Kingdom, he is often consulted by fellow doctors or families grappling with questions about when to withhold life-sustaining treatment.
“Taking somebody off artificial nutrition and hydration, that could be quite a difficult decision. Taking somebody off life support, or should we even put a patient on life support?” Dr. Rashid said.
“So these are sort of delicate questions that families sometimes do struggle with, and they expect some kind of expertise to guide them through this.”
Dr. Rashid added that Muslim doctors needed access to more guidance on such delicate issues.
“I think there’s very little information out there,” he said.
“From an Islamic perspective, it’s only been in the last, five years, 10 years maybe, where there’s been quite a bit of literature regarding this.”
Islamic Ethics
Australian Islamic Medical Association president Dr Muhammad Afzal Kahloon said the inaugural conference gave Muslim healthcare professionals the opportunity to “explore the intersectionality of medicine and Islamic ethics.”
“As healthcare professionals, it is our responsibility to give back to the community and promote the positive contributions of Australian Muslims to society,” he said.
“Some issues are more cultural than faith issues, so bringing people who are properly qualified from the Islamic point of view and from the medical point of view … they can provide a lot of guidance.”
Deliberately ending life is a violation of the penal codes in some Muslim countries. A person who tries to end their own life is dealt with in the courts.
In a previous fatwa published on AboutIslam, Dr. Muzzammil Siddiqi, President of the Fiqh Council of North America, stated that “Islam considers human life sacred. Life is to be protected and promoted as much as possible. It is neither permissible in Islam to kill another human being, nor even to kill one’s own self (suicide).”
“Killing is allowed only in a declared just war situation when the enemy comes to attack, then killing of the enemy is allowed for self-defense.”
On the other hand, the discussions of and fatwas issued by Muslim religious scholars in the Muslim world on organ donation proved to be an essential component of the fatwas issued for Muslims living in the West.
Several fatwas agree that both life and cadaveric organ donations are in principle permitted in Islam, on condition it is done for free.
None of the fatwas stated that this standpoint would change if the recipient or the donor was a non-Muslim.