Our bodies belong to God: Islam, medical science, and ethical reasoning in Egyptian life

This dissertation examines recent bioethical debates around organ transplantation based on fieldwork (2001-2004) in the Egyptian cities of Cairo, Tanta, and Mansoura. Efforts to initiate a national organ transplant program have consistently failed in the Egyptian Parliament for nearly three decades. Taking as a starting point that epistemological claims are always linked to power relations, this project examines how claims to truth and morality are made within both the fields of biomedicine and Islamic legal-ethical interpretation in Egypt's heated public debate about transplants. For many, the existence of a black market in human organs is the inevitable result of a practice that deals improperly with God's perfect creation, recasting it into a mass of interchangeable parts. For others, resistance to organ transplantation is a symptom of backwardness, hindering Egypt's technological progress and contributing to its inability to crack down on an illicit organ trade. While the vast majority of authoritative Islamic figures in Egypt declared organ transplantation to be conditionally permissible, ethical ambivalence toward the practice is pervasive. This ambivalence is often expressed in the avowal that "the body belongs to God." The dissertation traces a genealogy of this statement, most memorably articulated by the popular figure Shaykh Sha'rawi in his opposition to organ transplantation. It then follows the ways this broad theological tenet is imbued with various meanings by patients, their family members, physicians, and Islamic scholars in their responses to biotechnological interventions of the body.; Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate that social and material conditions and consequences of medical treatment are not separate from, but are formative of diverse religious opinions and ethical decisions. My analytic framework thus resists a facile "cultural difference" explanation for the resistance to organ transplantation, as neither "Egyptian culture" nor "Islam" comprises a singular cultural logic opposed to biomedicine, which is itself highly fractious and contingent upon the specificities of its various treatments. This dissertation unravels the complexities of ethical dispositions toward various medical practices that are articulated through the idea that the body belongs to God in the diverse contexts in which this statement is lived and uttered.