Islam and Biomedicine

Afifi al-Akiti · Aasim I. Padela

Aug 2022 · Philosophy and Medicine Book 137 · Springer Nature

About this ebook

This book showcases multidisciplinary research at the intersection of the Islamic tradition and biomedicine. Within this broad area of scholarship, this book considers how Islamic theological constructs align with the science and practice of medicine, and in so doing offer resources for bridging the challenges of competing ontological visions, varied epistemic frameworks, and different theologies of life and living among the bodies of knowledge. By bringing together theologians, medical practitioners and intellectual historians, the book spurs deeper conversations at the intersection of these fields and provides fundamental resources for further dedicated research.

About the author

Dato’ Dr Afifi al-Akiti is the Kuwait Fellow in Islamic Studies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and teaches in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Dato’ Afifi is trained as a theologian in both the Islamic and Western traditions. His areas of expertise are Islamic theology, law, and science. He has worked on several BBC documentaries, including the award-winning Science and Islam (2009). Since 2010, Dato’ Dr Afifi has been listed in The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims.

Dr Aasim I. Padela is a clinician, health researcher, and bioethicist at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He utilizes methodologies from health services research, religious studies, and comparative ethics to examine the encounter of Islam with contemporary biomedicine through the lives of Muslim patients and clinicians, and in the writings of Islamic scholars. His scholarship develops intellectual frameworks through which Islamic theology (both moral and scholastic) can engage with contemporary natural and social scientific data.