DAAD Regional Office Cairo
Wednesday, 28. February 2024, 17:30-21:00
“Paternity, Islamic Bioethics and the Body Politic”
Abstract:
The ethical concerns that sprang from medical advancements in medical and globalizing discourses and the related debates in Muslim majority countries are mostly being analyzed within the framework of bioethics, which originally came with a comparative perspective and a strong focus on culture and religion. Using the controversial issue of paternity and its establishment as an example, this talk will sketch the development of Islamic Bioethics as a specialized field with increasing social implications. It will argue that different strands of Islamic Bioethics, namely the formulation of ethical norms by trained experts, the implementation of such norms in state and society, as well the study of these processes and discussions, have begun to align on a common trajectory towards the social and political, as ethical matters become more and more enmeshed in issues and strategies shaping the form and structures of societies.
Bio:
Bjoern Bentlage is a post-doc researcher at the University of Munich, where he provisionally heads a research group on Arabic Mass Media. His current research focuses on Arabic travel writing and pilgrimage since the Early Modern period. Past projects and continuing interests concern law and culture in contemporary Egypt, especially with regard to Islamic Bioethics, and the entangled history of the Middle East. Bjoern was a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies in 2020 and served as an interim professor at the University of Münster (2020) and Leipzig University (2022-23). After studying in Bochum and Alexandria, he received his doctorate in 2016 at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where he was a lecturer from 2010 to 2022.
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