Muslim Disquiet over Brain-Death : <i>A</i><i>dvancing Islamic Bioethics Discourses by Treating Death as a Social Construct that Aligns Purposes with Criteria and Ethical Behaviours</i>

<p dir="ltr">There are some vigorous debates over the extent to which religion plays a role in modern healthcare. These debates includes concerns over clinicians providing religious and spiritual support (Sloan and Bagiella 2000), religious frameworks being used to inform bioethical rules and regulations (Murphy 2012; Schuklenk 2018; Duivenbode and Padela 2019; McCarthy, Homan and Rozier 2020), and religious values being used to support modifying or limiting conventional healthcare (Campbell 2018). Regardless of these important debates, religion and medicine both respond to the human condition. They address the existential questions of what we are, what will become of us, and what will be our end. While medicine and religion converge in responding to these queries, their epistemic frameworks differ and can lead to conflicts between patients, providers, and policy makers.</p><p dir="ltr">An area where differences in perspectives are readily observed, and where conflicts between various stakeholders may arise, is end-of-life healthcare. For example, the religious notion of “life after death” on account of a human soul may not square up with a biological notion that human life ends once organismal functioning ceases. Sometimes such differences have no bearing upon clinical care, but at other junctures different views lead to ethical conflict over when death should be declared, how the dying or dead patient should be treated, and what each stakeholder’s moral duties are.</p><h2>Other Information</h2><p dir="ltr">Published in: End-of-Life Care, Dying and Death in the Islamic Moral Tradition<br>License: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" target="_blank">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/</a><br>See chapter on publisher's website: <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004459410_004" target="_blank">https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004459410_004</a></p>