Complexities of biomedicine, theology and politics in Islamic bioethical deliberation over female genital procedures: a reply to ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’ by Richard Shweder

Abstract

Professor Richard Shweder’s target article, ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women: some reasonable doubts’, lays bare the ways in which political motivations influence moral, ethical and legal deliberations over female genital cutting/circumcision in society. He argues that activist stakeholders deploy a provocative lexicon and biased clinical data in order to silence dissenting views about, and legally restrict the practice of, female genital cutting/ circumcision. He suggests that a more balanced approach to discourse and more nuanced data analysis would open up avenues for tolerating religiously motivated female genital procedures carried out among Dawoodi Bohra communities residing in liberal democracies. Building upon his sociocultural analysis, this reply will explore the confluence of biomedical, theological and political considerations influencing contemporary Islamic bioethical discussion over the practice. I use my participation in the 2017–19 Fiqh Council of North America’s deliberations over female genital cutting to explore how (1) biomedical understandings and health outcomes data, (2) theological concerns over scriptural evidence and juridical best practices, and (3) political and social considerations influenced religious evaluation of the practice. I contend that Islamic juridical academies pursuing bioethical deliberation are not (and should not consider themselves to be) engaging in the routine application of scriptural reasoning in order to furnish guidance to a Muslim polity; rather, bioethics questions are necessarily layered with social and political considerations that require focused examination. This added dimensionality underscores the need for Islamic bioethics deliberation to move beyond the dyad of clinicians and jurists, and to include social scientists, public policy experts and other relevant scholars in order to properly conceive of and address the ethical problem space. Moreover, in the case of female genital cutting/circumcision, the bioethics veers towards biopolitics, making multidisciplinary deliberation all the more important in both religious and secular spaces.Key messagesFemale genital cutting/circumcision is a practice that has biomedical, social and religious dimensions.Moral, ethical, legal and political deliberation over female genital cutting/circumcision should account for the contentions and ambiguities over each of these dimensions of female genital cutting/circumcision.Islamic bioethical deliberation is more than just scriptural hermeneutics and searching for legal precedent; rather, it involves characterising the problem space along its biomedical, theological, social and political dimensions.Multidisciplinary approaches must therefore be used to accurately describe and address the ethical problem space that female genital cutting/circumcision occupies in both religious and secular contexts.