Cloning in the Qur'an and Tradition

Islamic Perspectives on Human Cloning

Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina
University of Virginia

In the present article I will attempt to summarize a wide range of opinions that
have emerged among the scholars of Islamic law and theology in its Sunni and
Shi`i formulations in the wake of the cloning technology that produced Dolly the
sheep. Although the cloning technology that is widely referred to in Muslim
literature deals with "embryo cloning," with which this article is mainly
concerned, among some scholars there is a wider comprehension of the
technology in the way it appears in the scientific literature dealing with genetics.
There cloning has been used in three broad areas:
1. In "molecular cloning" related to genetic research where scientists must
make millions of identical copies of genes of molecular size in order to
have sufficient material for testing;
2. In "cell cloning" related to specific cells where cell-lines with identical
properties are produced to study small dissimilarities between them; and
3. In "embryo cloning" related to early embryo development where embryo
multiplication is carried out by nuclear transplantation. This is the process
of introducing nuclei from the cells of early preimplantation embryos,
called blastomeres, into unfertilized eggs from which the nuclei have
been removed. It is the blastomeres that are able to produce a new
individual.
The ethical-juridical deliberations in the Muslim world have almost exclusively
expressed concerns about cloning technology dealing with blastomere separation
or embryo splitting and nuclear transplantation in human being. Although the use
of blastomere separation in cattle breeding has been in use in the Muslim world,
it is the dimension connected with human asexual reproduction that has raised
distinctive ethical dilemmas for Muslim jurists.
It is important to state from the outset that despite the plurality of reasoning and
judicial formulations based on independent research and interpretation of
normative legal sources in Islamic tradition, there is a consensus on juridicalethical opinions among Muslim religious experts on human cloning. The
majority of the Muslims in North America are Sunnis, who follow one of the four
officially recognized Sunni legal rites. The Shi`ites form a minority in North
America. And even though their scholars differ in their method of reasoning they
are in agreement with their Sunni colleagues in flashing the red light to human
cloning. In the wake of the latest success in animal cloning prominent scholars
representing Sunni centers of religious learning in the Middle East, mainly Cairo
in Egypt, have expressed their opinion, which is by now also regarded as an
official Sunni position in this country. The Arabic term used for this process in
the legal as well as journalistic literature is indicative of the widespread
speculation and popular perception regarding the goal of this technology, namely,
istinsakh, meaning `copying'. This interpretation is not very different from the
fictional cloning portrayed in In His Image: The Cloning of Man (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1978) by David M. Rorvik in the late 1970s when cloning by nuclear