Deliberations within the Islamic tradition on principle-based bioethics: an enduring task

This introductory chapter reviews the main attempts to formulate principles of biomedical ethics that are either compatible with the Islamic tradition or directly extracted from this tradition. To my knowledge, this is the first review of available studies on this topic, which is why I tried to make it as comprehensive as possible and to refer to each available study, although some of them may include considerable overlap and sometimes even repetition. The studies reviewed in this chapter were divided into two main groups. The first group addressed a specific set of principles introduced by Western bioethicists and tried to demonstrate its compatibility with the Islamic tradition (Instrumentalist Approach). The other group tried to develop a set of principles emanating from, and rooted in, the Islamic tradition itself (Indigenous Approach).