Islamic Bioethical Perspectives on Predictive Medicine

The emerging field of Predictive Medicine (PM) has the potential to predict the future health of humans. However, practicing PM raises key moral questions that intersect with scholarly disciplines like theology, jurisprudence in addition to the field of bioethics. This thesis made attempts to address some of these questions with special attention to perspectives in the Islamic tradition. The thesis starts with exploring how the broad fields of medicine and bioethics touched upon important biomedical and bioethical aspects of PM, e.g., its nature, benefits, harms, challenges, etc. The PM questions related to human agency and freedom and the challenges this new field posed to the long-held and conventional boundaries between health/normal and sick/abnormal were addressed through the lens of theology and philosophical conceptions respectively. The practical questions raised by the PM concerning the (im)permissibility of undertaking specific genetic screenings to predict one’s future health condition or that of one’s future offspring were addressed through the lens of Islamic jurisprudence.