Thought for the Day, 14 November 2008

Abdal Hakim Murad

Good morning.

Last week saw me in Rome, in the unfamiliar but splendid surroundings of the Vatican. I was there, with a group of Muslim delegates, to meet the Pope, and to engage in a three-day forum with Catholic thinkers on the two subjects of the love of God, and human dignity.

In his lecture, the Pope praised Muslim commitment to serving the needy, and issued a clarion call for a deep cooperation between Christians and Muslims, who share a belief in the sanctity of life.

Returning to England, I was at once confronted with a painful practical challenge to this simple principle. The headlines have been full of the case of Hannah Jones, the thirteen year-old who has been refusing medical treatment. She had been told by her hospital that she needed a heart transplant. With her parents, she learned that the operation might improve her quality of life, but might, also, trigger a return of her former condition of leukaemia. And there was a chance, too, that the operation itself would be fatal.

Hannah chose not to have the operation. But the hospital said she was wrong. Child protection officers were drafted in, and she was told that she could be removed from her parent's custody, and undergo the operation against her will.

Hannah continued to insist that she would not have the operation, and now the hospital has backed down.

So my dilemma was this. In Rome we had certainly agreed to care about the suffering sick, irrespective of their religion. But our brave talk about human dignity was couched in rather simple, cut-and-dried phrases about the sanctity of human life. Confronted with the Hannah Jones case, it didn't seem to offer an unambiguous answer to her dilemma.

The Muslim faith seems clear about the right to life. There is a tradition which stresses the nobility of patience in adversity. The Koran tells us to 'Give good news to those who patiently endure, who say, when misfortune strikes, 'We belong to God, and to God we all return.' Life is God's gift, and we must strive, and if necessary, suffer, to preserve it.

But is there always dignity in a life where medical science postpones death at the cost of a thousand side-effects? Do we believe in a God who wants us to linger, come what may?

In America, the Islamic Medical Association recently ruled that 'when the treatment becomes futile, it ceases to be mandatory.' Perhaps that helps a little. But my suspicion is that at the core of our human dignity is our ability to make reasoned choices. Catholics and Muslims agree that euthanasia is wrong. But it is also wrong to deny God's mercy to those who, coolly considering their options, choose to follow their conscience.