DOHA: The Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar said yesterday that it had made significant progress in developing its Islamic Medical and Scientific Ethics database as an international information resource.
The database is part of a project started by Georgetown's Bioethics Research Library, which was awarded a three-year grant in 2009 by the Qatar National Research Fund to create a literature database on Islamic bioethics.
"There are ethical issues to be addressed in almost every scientific and medical endeavour and, as such, Islamic bioethics is a subject area of growing importance all over the world. The Qatar Foundation very appropriately funded this project as one of its National Priorities Research Programme projects because of Qatar's plan to become a research hub," said Frieda Wiebe, the Library Director at Georgetown's Qatar campus and Co-Principal Investigator for the project.
She added, "One of the major contributions of this project -- in addition to being a valuable resource in the field of Islamic bioethics -- is that it will make material that was previously inaccessible, whether due to geography or language, accessible to everyone."
Issues that are addressed in Islamic bioethics include stem cell research, abortion, cloning, organ transplantation and in vitro fertilisation.
In the project's first phase, Georgetown's libraries in Qatar and Washington are collecting and indexing books and articles in English, Arabic and Persian that contain ethical discussions either originating in the Muslim world or reflecting Islamic perspectives on these issues.
Since October 2009, the research team has identified more than 400 writings and added them to the database. Materials for the collection are coming primarily from Iran, Kuwait and Egypt, although a number of fatwas on relevant topics are also being received from Saudi Arabia. The multidisciplinary nature of the subject means that sources are drawn from a variety of fields, including Islamic law, medicine, science, sociology and theology.
In the second phase of the database project, core documents written in Arabic will be translated into English and offered digitally as full text, wherever possible.
Print materials are currently housed in the Bioethics Research Library, and a companion physical collection will be established in the future in Qatar. The Bioethics Research Library is based at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, located at the Washington DC campus of Georgetown University. It is the world's first library dedicated to the study of bioethics.
© The Peninsula 2010
