Home / Library / Articles / Two Shi‘i Jurisprudential Methodologies to Address Medical and Bioethical Challenges

Two Shi‘i Jurisprudential Methodologies to Address Medical and Bioethical Challenges

The legal-ethical dynamism in Islamic law which allows it to respond to the challenges of modernity is said to reside in the institution of ijtihād (independent legal thinking and hermeneutics).

However, jurists like Mohsen Kadivar and Ayatollah Faḍlalla have argued that the “traditional ijtihād” paradigm has reached its limits of flexibility as it allows for only minor adaptations and lacks a rigorous methodology because of its reliance on vague and highly subjective juridical devices such as public welfare (maṣlaḥa), imperative necessity (ḍarūra), emergency (iḍtirār), need (ḥāja), averting difficulty (‘usr) and distress (ḥaraj), hardship (mashaqqa), and harm (ḍarar) without interrogating the fundamentals (uṣūl) of ijtihād. In contrast, in the “foundational ijtihād” model theology, ethics, intellect, epistemology, linguistics, hermeneutics, modern sciences, history, cosmology, anthropology, and the sources of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) interact with one another to obtain resolutions that are just and non-discriminatory.

Bibliographic Information

Title: Two Shi‘i Jurisprudential Methodologies to Address Medical and Bioethical Challenges

Author: hamid Mavani

Published in: Journal of Religious Ethics

 Language: English

Length: 21pages

About Ali Teymoori

Check Also

Millions March on Quds Day to Support Palestinians

Millions of people in Iran and across the world have taken to the streets to mark the International Quds Day, voicing their solidarity with Palestinians and decrying Israeli genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip....

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Google Analytics Alternative