Abstract

Muslim physicians and Islamic jurists analyze the moral dimensions of biomedicine using different tools and processes. While the deliberations of these two classes of experts involve judgments about the deliverables of the other's respective fields, Islamic jurists and Muslim physicians rarely engage in discussions about the constructs and epistemic frameworks that motivate their analyses. The lack of dialogue creates gaps in knowledge and leads to imprecise guidance. In order to address these discursive and conceptual gaps we describe the sources of knowledge and reasoning employed by Islamic jurists and clinicians to resolve the question of when a patient must seek healthcare. As we examine both the scriptural evidence and legal reasoning of jurists and the types of medical evidence used by clinicians to address the same question, we draw attention to the epistemic frameworks and constructs at play and identify how constructs from one field may sharpen the deliberative exercises of the other. Hence our work advances discourses at the intersection of Islam and medicine and offers building blocks for a comprehensive Islamic framework that fully integrates the deliverables of medical science within the deliberations of Islamic jurists.