Journal of Al Imam Al-Adham University College

The Jurisprudential collections have tackled the symptoms by means of
which man is considered dead. Due to the scientific progress in the medical
field, another concept of death has been emerged. This new concept is the
موت الدماغ في ضوء القواعد الشرعية والاجتهادات الفقهية
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permanent damage of brain that leads to permanent dysfunction of the brain
including the functions of brain stem.
This new concept necessitates investigating this issue in the field of jurisprudence
to decide to what extent this new definition will be accepted or
rejected. This study is an attempt to extract the effective cause of this issue
by relying on the jurisprudential maxims and the jurisprudential independent
reasoning that have been endorsed by the Islamic jurisprudence.
The study has taken the concept of life and death, as conceived by Muslim
jurisprudents and the scholars of Islamic theology, as the point of departure to
gather the legal information. It also has made use of the jurisprudential details
related to the subject and looked at the final stage of human life which resembles
a slaughtered person’s final moments when there will be no eyesight,
speech nor voluntary movement. The study has linked between the legal information
and the medical information which stipulates the absence of any
electrical activity in the brain cells and the absence of all the reflex actions
including the reflex actions from the spinal cord in order that the brain death
take place.
The study has concluded that the new concept can be accepted and adopted
from the Islamic law perspective.