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Comment by goodguyamericun | Hacker News Reader

I just want to say huge respect for Dr Mohammad who despite his faith decided to do what is right. It might not be well known but most muslims are raised with strong beliefs, even in educated countries (eg 85% in Pakistan support sharia).

God bless Dr mohammad

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The recipient is a non-Muslim, so no Sharia-related problems in his case.

AFAIK it is not forbidden for a Muslim to touch pigs, only to eat them. Pigs and dogs are impure, but you can perform ablution afterwards. Muslims normally own hunting and guarding dogs. That would actually be a common problem for Coalition soldiers in Iraq when they tried to enter a village by stealth - lots of barking.

"This impureness nevertheless doesn't imply that one might not touch a pork, but that one might need to wash his hands and maybe even re-do the ablution to be able to pray after touching it."

https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/48791/is-it-haram-...

I understand why pigs are “impure” (parasites in the meat), but why dogs?

Pigs are no more impure than dogs, fwiw. That belief is merely a result of having been raised in a culture that arbitrarily chooses to love dogs and cats and hate most other animals.

Dogs can be infested with parasites just as easily as pigs.

Well, but I don't think they eat dogs.

In Judaism at least, and I'd assume the same translates to Islam, "impurity" is understood to mean "ritually impure". It doesn't necessarily mean there's a specific scientific reason to avoid the meat, just that God asked them not to partake.

Yeah, ritual impurity is forgotten in modern West and hard to describe to a modern non-religious person.

It is not the same as "being unhygienic", though it overlaps to some degree. (Faeces etc.)

An interesting example from Judaism is "Tzaraath", which means skin disease, but it could also afflict houses. Today we do not know for sure what it even meant. Mold infestation? Maybe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzaraath#Affliction_of_housing

“Dogs are pets” is one of those cultural background assumptions that can be pretty jarring when you realize it’s not a universally held belief. There are pretty large chunks of the planet where dogs are mostly unwanted pests at best.

Muslims use dogs as pets, so it's not argument here.

It’s not a religious thing, it’s a geographic thing. Wild dogs are a serious problem in some areas, and whether or not dogs are viewed as common pets varies wildly. To pick one example, a mere 16 million homes in India have a dog, and that is up a lot over the past decade. Compare that to the 63 million homes with dogs in the US, a much smaller country by population.

This rule was written in an age when rabies was a big problem. It has a lot of sense to avoid scavenger dogs and pigs in those places in the past. Now we have developed a solution to this problem but, as is included as part of a religion is a fossil rule that can't be changed. We have still many of this rules around.

Science welcomes change when we find a better way to do something. Is assumed that humans can be wrong and learn. Religion will fiercely oppose change because god can't be wrong by definition (and nobody has the authority to fix it). Ideology will oppose also changes that see as a menace, but can be more flexible.

I don't know how many Muslims you're friends with but I wouldn't assume without some indication that this was difficult for him. There is a huge variety of beliefs in a population of over a billion adherents. Most of the ones I know have no issue with, for example, picking up a pack of bacon from the store as long as they're not the one expected to eat it.

Im sure it is morally justifiable to people of any religion, when performing the procedure is the only chance the patient has to continue living.

Porcine heart valves are largely accepted by Islamic scholars in situations where there are no alternatives available.

Abortion is largely accepted by Catholic scholars if there is, otherwise, a high risk of death. That doesn't mean all Catholic medical practitioners would carry out such an operation. I don't think the respect is misplaced.

That is absolutely false and made clear in the Catechism (though abortion is, fundamentally, not a matter of faith, but of ethics, contrary to popular misconception). Abortion understood as the intentional killing of the unborn child, even in the case of high risk of death, is always gravely morally illicit and falls under murder. Even in the given circumstance, it would violate the principle of double effect.

Now, what is morally licit is not abortion, but also by virtue of the principle of double effect, a procedure intended to save the mother's life that unintentionally and as a side effect results in the child's death. For example, it is morally licit to extract the affected tissue with the implanted embryo during an ectopic pregnancy. This extraction will result in the death of the child, but the death was neither intended nor was the death of the child the means by which the mother's life was saved nor is saving the life of the mother a lesser good than the life of the child (though in this case, both would very likely have perished if this condition had been allowed to continue). Note that the situation must be proportionally grave, meaning you could not licitly perform such a procedure if the risk to the mother was not proportional (like experiencing headaches because of the pregnancy). In those cases, proportional care is permissible.

> That is absolutely false and made clear in the Catechism (though abortion is, fundamentally, not a matter of faith, but of ethics, contrary to popular misconception).

A bit nit-picky, but while all authoritative documents (like the catechism) unequivocally condemns abortion, there is no shortage of Catholic scholars who are pro-abortion. Just like the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. The scholars gave it the green light, but not even having “Pontifical” in the name made it remotely authoritative.

Yes, how wonderful that a medical doctor would make an exception over his superstition. Truly a man of science!

Is there a need to be condescending about his beliefs, especially when what we're hearing of them is based on conjecture?

> sharia

Can anybody offer some insight into what people mean by that? I know that in the 19th century, sharia was basically just a legal tradition, that drew on Islam (just as western legal traditions draw on Christianity, or eastern ones Confucianism). Is it more extreme these days?

No. Sharia means different things to different people. Think of someone who calls themselves a "practicing Catholic", and then think of what that might mean to a non-Catholic hearing that. Do they eat meat on Fridays? Do they attend church every day? Do they protest health clinics? There are practicing Catholics who do all of these things and none of them.

Unfortunately, the word has been seized on in western culture to refer to the legal beliefs of militant Islamism. But that's not at all what it means to most Muslims.

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