Volkan Yıldıran Stodolsky, Assistant Professor from the School of Islamic Studies at Ibn Haldun University wrote an article titled "Pysician's Juristic Role" in which he discusses the normative and descriptive aspects of the physician’s juristic role and responsibilities according to Islamic law. The article is published on the web page of the Oxford Islamic Studies.
Stodolsky argues that to discuss the normative aspect of the physician's juristic role in Islamic bioethichs, one must first distinguish the juridical aspect of Islamic bioethics from bioethical views of Muslims. He underlines that while the juridical aspect of Islamic bioethics is based upon the Sharīʿah, the divine law revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad, and the hermeneutic principles established to study and apply its norms and commands to concrete situations, bioethical views of Muslims may not necessarily be based upon this revelation. "It is therefore possible for a Muslim physician to view the role of the physician based on bioethical opinions formulated by non-Muslims without referring to revelation." Stodolsky added. Though this would be a bioethical view by a Muslim, it would not constitute Islamic juridical thinking. Thus the discussion of the normative aspect of the physician’s juristic role will focus not on the bioethical views of Muslims concerning the physician’s juristic role, but rather the physician’s juristic role according to the revelation and Islamic legal methodology (uṣūl al-fiqh).
Stodolsky also underlines that the related yet distinct subject ofadab of medicine (medical etiquette), which deals with how health care professionals can achieve excellence in practicing their profession, falls outside the scope of this entry which deals with the procedure by which particular actions of physicians are assigned into one of the five Islamic ethico-legal categories of obligatory (farḍ), commendable (mandūb), permitted (mubāḥ), disliked (makrūh), and prohibited (ḥarām). The full article can be read by using this link.
