Abstract
Developments within medical technology and worldviews have during the 20th and 21st centuries challenged the definitions of both life and death . These developments have led to the need for defining new ethics concerning the usages of medical technology and research in relation to ethics of life. The Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences (IOMS) has since the early 1980 s been producing Islamic medical ethics (IME) as ethical frameworks for science and medicine based on Islamic tradition. However, producing such IME has been within an interdisciplinary field of collective reasoning, complementing Islamic law and ethics with medical anthropology, social and natural sciences. During the course of the 23 years from 1981 to 2004 the IOMS (or an early incarnation of it) produced through such collective reasoning two charters, or Codes, of IME pertaining to the practice and behavior of medical professionals. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the authority of those two Codes was constructed with regards to both traditional religious authority and the modern context of medical ethics. The two Codes were presented and produced within different contexts, to different audiences and through cooperation with different organizations and institutions. By using theories mainly of Bruce Lincoln, Max Weber, Muhammed Qasim Zaman and Alasdair MacIntyre the current study aims to examine the significance of these differences to the constructions of the Codes claims to authority. As such, my thesis portrays the authority of the Codes as relying on two interrelated practices within the field of IME: the traditional institutions of Islamic authority, law and ethics, and the field of modern medicine and ethics including its organizational structures. A second finding of the current study is that these two practices change in nature according to the contemporary context. The Code of 1981 was framed by an agenda of international, pan-Islamic ethics and politics, and a program of reform and resurgence of Muslim intelligentsia. In 2004, the Code was produced within a larger environment of global medical ethics and organizations such as the WHO. These differences led to a shift of focus, where in 1981 the role of Islam was defined as a source of universal ethics, and over to being one of several discourses on medical ethics in 2004. These developments led to a larger degree of rationalizing modern science and medicine within the Islamic tradition. The study is partly based on a view of historical continuity and modernity as a symbiotic pair in the development of tradition. Therefore, the rationalizing of modern science and medicine is concluded to be a natural process in the development of traditional, religious authority.