Baby Milk Bank of Karachi and The Islamic Bioethics

By New Age Islam Staff Writer 29 June 2024 Karachi Milk Bank Was Shut Down Due To Adverse Fatwa From A Seminary Main Points: 1. Baby Milk Bank or Lactarium is a modern way of wet nursing. 2. West countries have baby milk banks for pre-term babies. 3. The first baby milk bank was opened in Boston Floating Hospital inn1910. 4. Iran, Bangladesh and Kuwait have baby milk banks. ------ Mr Praveen Swami delves into the issue of baby milk bank and the Islamic bioethics involved in it. Baby milk banks are modern alternative to wet nursing, an ancient practice in Asia, Europe and Africa. The wet nurse of the pharaoh Tutankhamun was named Maia. The prophet Moses was adopted by the Pharaoh and his mother was requested by the royal court to breast feed him because the pharaoh did not know that Moses was her own child. It means that the practice of wet nursing was an accepted practice during that time. The wet nurse of Islamic Prophet was called Halima. The milk bank was inaugurated by Dr. Azra Pechuho, the provincial health minister of Sindh, along with officials from UNICEF and the Pakistan Paediatric Association | UNICEF Pakistan ------- A wet nurse was engaged to breast feed a child when the mother was not able to breast feed her or did not produce enough milk. But in royal or elite families, the women did not want to breast feed their babies and employed a wet nurse. The Quran permits this practice. It says: "If you decide to have your children nursed by a wet nurse, it is permissible as long as you pay fairly." (Baqarah:233) In modern times wet nurses may be difficult to find, particularly, when babies are born in hospitals. Many babies are pre-term babies and have to be kept in hospitals for longer periods. Therefore, finding a wet nurse may be a problem. So, the idea of baby milk banks caught up. In milk banks, the breast milk of donor women are pasteurised and stored for a long period, say 8 months. United Nations promoted milk banks and more than 30 countries joined the initiative. WHO stated that the first alternative to a biological mother not being able to breast feed is the use of human milk from other sources. Therefore, along with the European countries, some Islamic countries also started baby milk banks. But the bioethics of baby milk banks in Islamic society was a big hindrance in their popularity. Bangladesh, UAE and Iran have milk banks but some theologians expressed their reservations on the issue. For example, the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation proscribed milk banks because milk brothers and sisters are prohibited from marriage and in a milk bank, the record of donor women and the babies that are fed with her milk cannot be maintained. On the other hand, modern Islamic scholar Javed Ahmad Ghamidi approves of the milk bank arguing that through milk bank, a baby does not suckle the woman. Therefore, the rule of kinship does not apply here. But the Jamia Darul Uloom of Pakistan does not agree with the argument. When the Sindh Institute of Child Health, Karachi opened a baby milk bank aided by UNICEF and sought the fatwa from the Darul Uloom, it initially issued the fatwa approving of it with a condition that the milk bank must maintain a record of the donors and the beneficiary babies but later revised its position saying that it was not possible to maintain such a record and that poor women may sell their milk depriving their own babies of their breast milk and elite and rich women may exploit the poor women. Subsequently, the Karachi milk bank was shut down. The issue has been referred to the Council of Islamic Ideology that advises the state on religious issue but it may not go against the fatwa of Darul Uloom. The Council has not been able to guide the government on the issue of mob lynching of innocent Christians and even Muslims on whimsical and false accusations of blasphemy in Pakistan. The Karachi milk bank was shut down because if it continued even after the fatwa, some religious organisation might blow it up. This is the dilemma with the Muslim world today. Though all the theologians claim that Islamic law or jurisprudence is rooted in the Quran and Sunnah, they present divergent and often contrary interpretations of the Quran and cherry pick hadiths to suit their position no matter if the hadith is weak. In this case too, the theologians of Bangladesh, Iran and Kuwait find baby milk banks Shariah compliant, but the theologians of Pakistan find it problematic. Their opinion on the issue may change after 30 or 40 years as has been the case with the use of loudspeakers or the TV. The loudspeaker was the voice of the devil and the TV was also a satanic device. But now they cannot live without them. In fact they lije more to go to the TV studios to attend debates. Mr Pravin Swami observes that the issue of bioethics has not created problems for only Muslims. Other communities and their leaders have also expressed reservations to new ideas and scientific developments. For example, Gandhiji had opposed small pox vaccination on the ground that it involved cells harvested from the cow's udders. The Jehovah's Witness, a religious community, does not allow their children blood transfusion for religious reasons. However, the reservations of the Muslims on the issue may disappear with time because the Muslims have always shown a knee jerk reaction to every scientific invention or a new idea. Examples galore. Till then, preterm babies may be fed with formula milk or breast fed by wet nurses. ----- Pakistani Fundamentalists Closer to Controlling State. Now The Battle Is Over Baby Milk Bank By Praveen Swami 26 June, 2024 The judges had decided their punishment before the trial began: Like Jesus, the Persian-born mystic Abu al-Mughis al-Husayn bin Mansur al-Hallaj, known to the world as Mansur al-Hallaj, was crucified, and his body burned together with his books. From Gujarat and Kashmir, to Mecca and Medina, al-Hallaj had relentlessly campaigned against the Abbasid Caliphate’s harsh oppression of the working poor, preaching the radical idea that the pursuit of kashf, or enlightenment, could unite the human soul with God. For a while, the scholar Shemeem Burney Abbas has written, al-Hallaj was defended by Shaghab, mother of the caliph al-Muqtadir—but by 922 C.E., all his protectors had been marginalised in court. The word of God belonged, after all, to the state and its servants, not heretics. Last week, newspaper headlines around the world documented the the brutal lynching of Muhammad Ismail, a tourist from Punjab who was tortured and then set on fire by a cheering mob in Pakistan’s idyllic Swat. The savage killing is part of a grinding campaign of violence against alleged blasphemers, spearheaded by the Far-Right Tehreek Labbaik-e-Pakistan, or TLP. Even as the horror in Swat unfolded, religious fundamentalists were registering an even more significant success. Karachi’s prestigious Sindh Institute of Child Health and Neonatology shut down the country’s first human milk bank after the powerful Jami’a Dar-ul-Uloom seminary withdrew theological sanction for its operations. The decision, doctors say, endangers the lives of preterm babies whose mothers are unable to breastfeed them. The battle over milk banks, part of a bitter debate within Islam, has pitted modernisers against fundamentalists in many countries. The case of Pakistan is unique, though: Nowhere else has the decision to open, or close, a medical facility been delegated to clerics with no legal or constitutional authority. Fundamentalists have proved willing to sacrifice infants for the cause of building a theocratic dystopia, while the nation-state has demonstrated it can do nothing but stand by and watch. The Baby Milk Battle Ever since the mid-1980s, when milk banks began to establish themselves as a key tool of advanced neonatal care, Islamic clerics pushed back against the concept. Islamic theology, doctors Sonia Subudhi and Natasha Sriraman note, mandates the existence of Rida’a, or so-called milk kinship between the non-biological infant and the woman who breastfeeds them, as well as her biological children. The Shari’ah, or religious law, proscribes marriages between so-called milk brothers and sisters. Islam recognised the critical importance of breastfeeding, and wet nursing was a well-established practice among the Bedouin communities where the religion first emerged. The Organisation of Islamic Countries’ bioethics panel, doctors Mohammed Ali al-Bar Hassan Chamsi-Pasha wrote, proscribed milk banks in 1985, arguing that it was impossible for them to maintain the sanctity of milk kin relationships. That hasn’t ended the debate though. Some theologians, like Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, argue that the milk-kinship relationship applies only when children are suckled, not by milk itself. Iran thus has several milk banks, together with Bangladesh and Kuwait, each operating under somewhat different kinds of religious compliance. In Singapore and the United States, where there are significant Muslim communities, some clerics have given theological approval to existing milk banks. Giving preterm babies pasteurised donor breast milk instead of formula, experts have said, gives significant protection against dangerous conditions like necrotising enterocolitis. Earlier this year, when the Sindh Institute of Child Health decided to open a United Nations Children’s Fund-aided breast milk facility, it reached out to clerics at the Dar-ul-Uloom, which traces its origins to the famous seminary of Deoband. The seminary responded with a Fatwa, or opinion, giving conditional permission. The Fatwa stipulates, among other things, that records be maintained of donors so milk kinship relationships could be established, and that milk only be given from Muslim mothers to Muslim children—a record-keeping provision that, interestingly, is not applied to organ transplants or blood transfusions. The facility was inaugurated by Dr. Azra Pechuho, the provincial health minister of Sindh, together with officials from UNICEF and the Pakistan Paediatric Association. The Theology of Death For reasons that aren’t entirely clear—likely tied to ideological power struggles within the institution—the Dar-ul-Uloom suddenly changed course last week, amid the renewed blasphemy mobilisation. The institution now declared, a new Fatwa, that the terms it had laid out were impossible to observe. There was, it argued, no way to ensure the traceability of all donors. There were also wider problems: Letting poor mothers sell milk might deprive their own babies, while elite women would shirk their religious obligation to their children. The hospital promptly shut down the milk bank; one spokesperson for the institution bitterly told media, “Our society has lost the ability to debate like educated people.” The issue has now been referred to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a body founded in 1962 to advise the state on religious issues. The body, political scientist political scientist Sarah Holz has noted, has come to be dominated by small-town clerics with reactionary views. Ever since the Lahore carpenter Ilm-ud-Din murdered the anti-Islam polemicist Mahashe Rajpal in 1927—possibly seeking to expiate guilt over homoerotic longing, documents show—this cowing-down has characterised the course of the project of Pakistan. Lacking legitimacy, elites sought to recruit the clerics and faith to their cause, with tragic consequences. In the late 1970s, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime backed clerical demands for a theocratic state, in return for their declaring that Nizam-e-Mustafa, the order ordained by Islam, demanded the centralisation of power in a despot. Following 9/11, General Pervez Musharraf created his own clerical army, , backing reactionary elements in the Barelvi sect in the hope of outmanoeuvring his jihadist opponents. The State and God Islam isn’t unique in promoting anti-science. MK Gandhi resisted life-saving smallpox vaccinations, historian Nandini Oza reminds us, arguing they involved cells harvested from cows’ udders. For years, doctors in the West have been compelled to turn to courts to battle parents belonging to the Jehovah’s Witness sect, who refuse to allow their children to be given blood transfusions. Ethical debates rage around issues like circumcision and abortion. The issue with the Karachi milk bank, though, isn’t the conflict between medicine and faith: It is whether clerics or the state and its democratic institutions should have the power to judge issues of bioethics. In this case, a degraded state has surrendered its authority to decide. Late one afternoon in August 1948, as military doctor Major Mahmud Ahmad desperately tried to restart his stalled car on a Quetta road, someone in an angry mob of cleric-led anti-Ahmadi protestors noticed he had a neatly trimmed beard. That was, to them, enough proof Ahmad was an apostate. The doctor’s body was found days later, one lung pierced with a knife, and guts carved out of his body. The very first blasphemy murder in Pakistan was of a man charged with protecting its nationhood. From Surriya Shafi, charged with blasphemy for using pictures of mermaids in a college-level English textbook, to High Court judge Arif Husain Bhatti, killed for acquitting a blasphemy-accused, and Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, assassinated by a fanatic: The victims of Pakistan’s theocracy have not just been religious minorities, but the upholders of its state. Today, the mob in Swat, and the jihadists who murder Pakistani soldiers each day, aren’t just destroying the state: They’re also coming for the country’s children. ----- Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. (Edited by Theres Sudeep) Source: Pakistani Fundamentalists Closer to Controlling State. Now The Battle Is Over Baby Milk Bank URL: https://www.newageislam.com/debating-islam/baby-milk-bank-karachi-islamic-bioethics/d/132601 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism