Bioethics & Organ Transplantation in a Muslim Society

Abstract

FarhatMoazam was born in Pakistan and attended medical school there. For many years, she pursued her surgical and pediatric training in the United States, witnessing not only scientific progress in organ transplantation but also the rise of modern secular bioethics, the advocacy of individual rights and patient autonomy, and feminism(p. 175). Equipped with such privileged knowledge, she obtained high-ranking positions back in Pakistan, reflecting her competence as both a medical doctor and a medical ethics specialist. While working on this dissertation (she received her doctorate in religious studies from the University of Virginia in 2004), however, she employed a third and quite unexpected quality: that of an ethnographer. ButMoazamhas no ambition to contribute to the broader theoretical discussion of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift (W.W. Norton & Co., 2000). Rather, she brushes aside the applicability of reasoning in the tradition of the reception of Mauss (cf. pp. 126, 138, 143, and 218). Similarly, she is not concerned with theoretical ethnological or sociological debates on globalization and its local appropriations, although, ultimately, this is what the story is about. To conduct her fieldwork, she chose to spend three months at a dialysis and renal transplantation unit in her hometown of Karachi. This vanguard institution for end-stage-renal-disease (ESRD) patients, part of her old medical college, is now both the largest and the first institution of its type in Pakistan. In addition, the country’s first renal transplant was performed there in 1985. Financed to a lesser degree by the state, about 60 percent of the institute’s budget has to be raised by sponsors (p. 46). Such services as dialysis, transplantation, medication, and follow-up are free of charge (p. 37), so there is a tremendous overflow of people in need. The institute, having started its pioneering work in a traditional society that is still strongly averse to posthumous donation, has to rely on live ...