Machine summary:
Instead, this emerging discipline needs to define its epistemic parameters and develop both a methodology and a justificatory mechanics of moral reasoning that explore and open venues for deriving ethical "recommendation (tawsiyya)" rather than "judicial opinion (fatwa)" on issues that confront human health and medical research in Muslim societies.
Since the natural home for Islamic bioethics is a comparative ethics program within a Religious Studies department, we need to emphasize the teaching of Islamic legal and ethical methodology as shown in Figures I and II, so that students can identify the moral-legal principles that are operative in justificatory processes employed by Muslim jurists.
In other words, do we need to develop a course that specifically looks at Muslims as distinct peoples with their own specific cultural experience and normative sources; or, should we look at the bioethical issues as the byproduct of a universal biomedical technology that is impacting upon people’s expectations about life and their responses to the moral dilemma that they encounter in their everyday interaction with the world of science and medical advancement?
Secular bioethics that has been thus far imported from the West (through the translations of Western studies and the pioneering articles and reports of Muslim physicians returning from abroad) cannot meet the challenges that face healthcare institutions in the Muslim world if that training does not include culturally sensitive norms and rules to resolve moral problems facing the medical profession and patient care.
Practical aspects of teaching An Islamic biomedical course needs to discuss the ways in which ethical norms interact with cultural realities to produce a specific response to a moral dilemma.