A new fatwa was announced by the British National Health Service (NHS) in June 2019 to clarify the Islamic position on organ donation. Additionally, the NHS promotional material presents brief arguments for and against organ donation in Islam. However, to date, research into the various fatwas on organ donation is required. This article goes beyond the dichotomous positions mentioned by the NHS and goes on to explore and summarise seven conflicting views on the issue extrapolated from an exhaustive reading of fatwas and research papers in various languages since 1925. Our discussion is circumscribed to allotransplant and confined to the gifting of organs to legally competent adult donors at the time of consent. These arguments include an analysis of the semantic portrayal of ownership in the Qur’an; considering the net benefit over the gross harm involved in organ donation; balancing the rights of the human body with the application of the rule of necessity; understanding the difference between anthropophagy and organ transplantation; understanding of death, and the conceptualisation of the soul. We argue that, given the absence of clear-cut direction from Muslim scripture, all seven positions are Islamic positions and people are at liberty to adopt any one position without theological guilt or moral culpability.

This paper discusses the symbolic capital found within Islamic documents that were circulated in the UK during the COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, the work explores “fatwas” and “other” similar documents as well as “guidance” documents (referred to as FOGs) that were circulated in March–April 2020 on the internet and social media platforms for British Muslim consumption. We confine our materials to FOGs produced only in English. Our study takes its cue from the notion that the existence of a variety of documents created a sense of foggy ambiguity for British Muslims in matters of religious practise. From a linguistic angle, the study seeks to identify (a) the underlying reasons behind the titling of the documents; and (b) the construction of discourses in the documents. Our corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CA-CDA) found noticeable patterns that hold symbolic capital in the fatwa register. We also found that producers of “other” documents imitate the fatwa register in an attempt to strengthen their documents’ symbolic capital. Accordingly, fatwas act as the most authoritative documents in religious matters and are written by senior religious representatives of the Muslim community, whereas guidance documents were found to be most authoritative in health matters. The findings raise questions regarding the manner in which religious instruction may be disseminated in emergency situations. Based on this study, a call for the standardisation and unification of these diverse and sometimes contradicting religious publications may be worth considering.

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