Useful Technology or the Work of the Devil?

In the Islamic world, views on cloning tend to be subject to fine distinctions. In order to understand these better, certain special properties of Islamic law must be taken into consideration, as described in the following by the Orientalist Thomas Eich.

photo: AP
Greenpeace protest against human cloning

​​In autumn 2003 a dramatic vote took place at the UN: the members were asked to decide whether or not to ban cloning technology, completely or only in part. One group pled for a variation espoused above all by Germany and France, arguing that only reproductive cloning should be prohibited. An alternative stance originated out of a Costa Rican initiative that had also found support in the USA.

Here, the proponents insisted that all forms of cloning should be banned, even those commonly accepted as having therapeutic aims. Some scientists believe that therapeutic cloning offers the promise of finding a cure for illnesses such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease.

At the last minute, a third recommendation was brought to the floor from an unexpected quarter, and ended up winning by a narrow majority: the whole vote should simply be postponed.

This suggestion came from Iran, which at that time was UN delegate for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a federation of 56 nations with a resident Muslim majority. At the latest since these events, commentators agree that in key bioethics issues on the political plane it is no longer permissible to simply ignore the opinion of the Muslim World.

Ordinary organ transplantations

What were the OIC’s arguments for evidently wanting to postpone a final decision on a cloning ban? Central to this decision was an advisory opinion (fatwa) issued by Egyptian religious authority Ahmad at-Tayyib in early 2003, when he was working at the Ministry of Justice in Cairo.

It was in the name of the Ministry that he proclaimed this fatwa. In it, he argued that reproductive cloning should be prohibited, but that therapeutic cloning did not pose a problem under Islamic law (Sharia).

After all, this technology was of benefit to mankind since it was used to generate specific organs or tissues that could be transplanted into the human body. Therefore, this procedure could be judged to represent a common organ transplantation, which in turn was permissible according to the Sharia when it served to save, or substantially improve the quality of, a human life.

Based on this fatwa, why then did the OIC not simply support the recommendation originating in Germany to allow only therapeutic cloning? One of the reasons might have been that a lively bioethics debate has arisen in recent years in countries with a Muslim majority, and hence a unanimous "Islamic" opinion can no longer be discerned.

Let us first take a closer look at reproductive cloning, the technology by which a cell nucleus is implanted in an egg cell from which the nuclear DNA has been removed, and this cell is then allowed to divide and is implanted in the uterus of a woman who will carry and give birth to the new life. This new human will have the same DNA as the donor of the cell nucleus.

Seducing people into changing God’s creation

What do Muslim religious scholars (ulama) have to say about this? There is one group that condemns this procedure as "the work of the devil", citing a certain verse in the Koran.

This position is taken for example by Shiite scholar Shams ud-Din from Lebanon and by the former Mufti of Egypt, Nasr Farid Wasil. In the Koran verse in question, the devil says to God that he will seduce people into changing God’s creation (Koran 4: 118–119).

Others, such as Hussein Fadlallah from Lebanon, argue that this verse does not apply here, since cloning does not constitute a change in creation, but rather the discovery of new forms of reproduction within creation.

If cloning should be banned at all, then not due to the procedure itself, since it does not call into question God’s prerogative, but rather because of the social implications of this technology.

The Sharia sees it as one of its major tasks to keep lines of descent (nasab) as pure as possible. But this does not merely entail the fact that it should always be clear who begat whom.

The Sharia also views it as extremely important that procreation take place within a legitimate legal framework, i.e. marriage. This legal-moral element is of such overriding importance for the Sharia that it even to a great extent takes priority over biology: a child born out of wedlock has no nasab to his father (for most interpretations of the law, motherhood is constituted through the birth itself). Such a child is thus not seen as the illegitimate offspring of the man; in a certain sense it is not even his child at all.

If the ulama thus deem it necessary to prohibit cloning because it would lead to a lack of clarity in the nasab lineages, this is not only because the clone no longer arises as a mixture of the DNA of a man and a woman.

Instead, they are thinking of the possibilities presented by the procedures used to create the sheep Dolly, for example: here the DNA of a ewe was implanted in the egg cell of another sheep (also a ewe), which was then carried to term by a third ewe.

Cloning within marriage

Transferring this example to humans, it is plain to see that here no sort of marital relationship under Islamic law could ever come into question. If we analyze the statements made by the legal authorities, we can discern that cloning does not necessarily represent a problem as long as the context of marriage is preserved. But to most observers, this fine distinction is not readily apparent.

In an interview with Sheikh al-Azhar Muhammad Sayyid at-Tantawi in early 2003, for example, the Arabic press summarily concluded in a headline that "Sheikh al-Azhar Forbids Cloning". This pronouncement did not really reflect all that was said in the interview, however. Tantawi actually stated that "All forms by which a human is created from nothing and outside of the context of marriage are forbidden in the Sharia."

Other very influential and widely recognized scholars had likewise failed to express any misgivings against cloning as a form of procreation within a marriage, an opinion voiced as early as 1998 by Wahba az-Zuhaili from Damascus.

The human being reduced to a means

Here we can perceive a major difference from the debates on cloning with which we are familiar in Europe and the USA. There, one of the main opposing arguments is that cloning technology represents an encroachment on basic human dignity, since the human being becomes simply a means to an end and is no longer an end in himself.

This definition of human dignity can hardly be found anywhere in the arguments put forward by Muslim religious leaders, which is not to say of course that the concept of human dignity or human rights is not just as important for Muslims. It’s just that these concepts do not play much of a role in discussions on cloning.

Only the former Mufti of Tunisia, Muhammad Mukhtar as-Salami, takes this approach in his arguments. His pronouncements read like the direct translation of Kantian principles into Arabic. This doesn’t make his statements un-Islamic per se, or any less authentic, much less discredit them. Yet it is quite evident that Salami’s arguments do not find much of an echo in predominant Muslim views of cloning.

Law and morality – No clear distinction

In order to understand the comments made by modern Muslim legal experts on any given topic, one must first comprehend two fundamental things. First of all, Islamic law – as the term indicates – is a legal system, and therefore the applicable statements on cloning are to a large degree concerned with the question of what consequences a concrete violation of the law might have.

These consequences must not necessarily be of a criminal nature, but may involve instead, just as in German law, the rights to child support payments or inheritance.

Secondly, under Islamic law an actual breach of the law in many cases entails consequences not on the legal level, but on the moral level instead: the punishment of sinners is explicitly left up to God and the beyond. This means that the Sharia does not make a sharp distinction between what is legally and morally right, as we may be accustomed to from our secular legal systems.

Ongoing development and modernization of the Sharia takes place primarily in the form of fatwas. These advisory opinions take a very specific form: they are always answers to concrete questions that are brought before the Muftis.

Here, any kind of question is fair game, from rules for eating, to proper prayer procedure, to the legitimacy of the Iraq war, up to and including the stand the law takes on oral sex, or in this case the question of cloning.

As a rule, the answer provided by the Mufti is limited to a response to the actual question asked. If this question were, for example, which family ties a chimera – a cross between man and animal – would have, the Mufti (in this case it was the spiritual leader of the Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei) would respond only to this question.

His sober manner of dealing with this question should not, however, be taken as indicating that he regards such experiments as permissible and harmless. For that would be another question entirely: Not "What are the familial relationships of a chimera?", but instead: "Is the creation of chimeras condoned by the Sharia?"

The latter question is answered with an unequivocal "no" by Muslim legal authorities, because it would be a case of changing God’s creation. These two points – on the one hand the constant oscillation of the Sharia between legality and morality, and on the other hand the continuing evolution of the law based on very concrete fatwa requests – tend to make it difficult for outside observers, no matter what their faith, to subject the statements of modern Muslim legal scholars to an exacting analysis.

"Copying organs"

But to get back to the fatwa issued by the Egyptian Ahmad at-Tayyib that we mentioned at the beginning: he had been asked, among other things, if therapeutic cloning was condoned by the Sharia, to which he replied with a clear "yes".

His justification: after all, this technology was of use to people in fighting disease. This argument for the general benefit of mankind can be found often in the opinions of Muslim legal experts. It goes by the name of maslaha and is a firmly established component of the Sharia.

The problem here, however, is one of terminology. The Arabic term that is customarily used for therapeutic cloning is istinsakh al-a'da, the literal translation of which is "copying organs". From this and various statements made by the scholars, it is evident that some are insufficiently aware of the wider implications of this technology.

Therapeutic cloning implies as a first step the creation of a human clone, which is manipulated as soon as the first stages of cell division are complete so that the cell material does not grow into a human being but rather into an organ in a guest organism. This manipulation entails the destruction of the developing embryo.

The ear on the back of the mouse

There are by all means technologies available that, so to speak, "copy organs", for example the famous experiments in which a modeled ear was implanted onto the back of a mouse. These technologies have nothing to do with therapeutic cloning however.

Ears or noses are made up of cartilage that can be reproduced easily and that does not need to take over any genuine bodily functions. It’s another case entirely for hearts, lungs or kidneys. These organs can be "replicated" only with great difficulty, which is why people place great hopes in the technology of therapeutic cloning.

And here is where the ethical problems begin, because therapeutic cloning also means creating an embryo and using it to benefit another person. In the bioethics debates raging in Europe and the USA, this is criticized again and again based on the inviolability of human dignity as an end in itself.

One might assume that Muslim religious scholars would have less of a problem with this technology, since, first of all, the argument for human dignity hardly plays much of a role in the Muslim debate and, secondly, the aspect of maslaha provides a basis for backing the stance taken by scientists that therapeutic cloning must be allowed as a way to cure a variety of human illnesses.

There’s no such thing as "The Islamic Position"

As a matter of fact, there are a number of prominent scholars, such as Ahmad at-Tayyib, Ayatollah Muhammad Sa'id al-Hakim (Iraq), and former Egyptian Mufti Nasr Farid Wasil, who argue in favor of permitting therapeutic cloning based on precisely this line of reasoning.

As mentioned above, however, it is uncertain if in these cases it was always clearly understood that an embryo must be destroyed in the process.

Other religious leaders whose opinion likewise carries great weight, such as the famous television Mufti Yusuf al-Qaradawi, take a more critical posture on therapeutic cloning. Al-Qaradawi pleads for allowing only those forms of cloning by which organs can be cultivated "directly" in the guest organisms, without taking a "detour" by way of creating a human clone.

Similar arguments are advanced by Shiite scholars like Hasan al- Jawahiri from Qom in Iran, who believes that only those forms of cloning should be permissible that do not entail embryo destruction, which, in view of the current state of research in this field, amounts to a complete ban on this technology.

As we can see, there is simply no such thing as "The Islamic Position" on cloning. In the case of both reproductive and therapeutic cloning, there are groups for and against a ban on each technology.

On the whole, the current trend seems to be that the group of those who do not think that reproductive cloning should be categorically prohibited is growing at the same pace as the group of those with strong objections to therapeutic cloning.

Thomas Eich, © Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27.03.2004

Translation from German: Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

Thomas Eich is an Orientalist currently doing research at the Ruhr-University of Bochum on the theme of "Cross-Cultural Bioethics".