Sharia Scholars and Modern Biomedical Advancements: What Role for Religious Ethics in the Genomic Era?

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it became clear that the ramifications of the breathtaking biomedical advancements and associated technologies will not remain within the confines of scientific and clinical practices. The complex questions and challenges raised by these advancements and technologies also necessitated profound ethical considerations. Various religions and philosophies addressed these questions and challenges as part of their historical role in responding to peoples’ concerns and curiosities, in addition to demonstrating that they still hold influential roles in the age of modernity, with all its new challenges. By the middle of the twentieth century, the role of religious thought in the field of biomedical ethics in Western scholarship, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, started to wane. Furthermore, several scholars who specialized in religion and theology in their academic studies brushed aside religious discourse and instead adopted a secular one when they embarked on the field of biomedical ethics. In his study on the history of the relationship between religion and bioethics, Albert Jonsen (Professor of the History of Medical Ethics at the University of Washington) drew a comparison between what the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci did in 1582 when he crossed the Western borders traveling to the then “forbidden empire,” viz. China, and what a large number of theologians did 400 years later when they decided to specialize in the field of bioethics, in the sense that they “doffed the intellectual garb of religious ethics and donned, if not the white coats of doctors, the distinctly secular mentality of modern medicine” (Jonsen 2006, 23).