Now Good Vision is Un-Islamic

Better to be blind, for the sake of your soul.

The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan have decided that corneal transplants are un-Islamic, and forbidden them accordingly. They’d rather see their people go blind than offend Allah, and so, apparently would Allah.

To be fair, Jesus famously says: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” (Matthew 5:29) But that is rhetorical exaggeration to make a point — that one should go to immense lengths to avoid sin — rather than a literal command.

But in Afghanistan, as the Telegraph reported on Tuesday, “hundreds of people each year will be denied sight-saving operations in Afghanistan after the Taliban forbade corneal transplants.” This is not because being able to see well might cause Afghans to sin, but because the very act of endeavoring to see well by means of a cornea transplant is offensive to Islam: “Officials have ruled that the transplant procedure is not permitted under Islamic teachings and have ordered surgeons to halt operations.”

In a war-torn country such as Afghanistan, many people are going to pay a heavy price for Islamic purity: “Dr Noor Zaman Hashim of Noor Eye Hospital in Kabul said his staff had conducted 90 transplants in recent months, before the programme had been halted by the Taliban order. He said the hospital had a growing waiting list, comprising mostly young people who had lost their eyesight because of trauma, injuries, explosions and welding-related accidents.”

Dr. Hashim explained: “Decades of violence have devastated Afghanistan’s healthcare infrastructure. We neither have sufficient ophthalmologists nor locally available corneas to meet the demand for transplants. The Taliban have verbally instructed us to stop the transplants. Nobody has the courage to defy their orders because of the risk of severe punishment.”

Dr Fawad Zaffar of the Illinois-based charitable organization Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA), said: “Since 2017, we have been sending free corneas to Pakistan, where 10,000 people have benefited. About four months ago, we expanded the programme to Afghanistan, where hundreds of people needed corneal transplants. However, the Taliban’s directives have severely disrupted the programme.”

Khadija Begum, who “suffered an eye injury in an explosion in Jalalabad,” will suffer from the ban: “I was registered at Jalalabad Eye Hospital two months ago, but last month the Taliban directed the hospital to close the programme, saying it was against Islamic teachings.”

The Qur’an doesn’t mention cornea transplants. So why do the Taliban think they’re un-Islamic? Mufti Muhammad ibn Adam al-Kawthari, who is based in Britain, states that “it is a well-established principle of Shariah that all the organs of a human body, whether one is a Muslim or a non-Muslim, are sacred and must not be tampered with. To take benefit from any part of a human is unlawful (haram). Allah Almighty made humans the best of creations and created everything for their benefit. Allah Most High Says: ‘It is He, who has created for you all things that are on earth.’ (Surah al-Baqarah, 2.29) Thus, it is permissible for a human to take benefit from every creation of Allah which includes animals (under certain conditions), plants and inanimate things. As such, it would be unreasonable to place humans in the same category of the above things by giving permission to use parts and derive benefit out of their body that necessitates cutting, chopping and amputating parts of the body. This is certainly unreasonable and unlawful on a human body.”

The mufti explicitly rules out the possibility that such transplants could become lawful in cases of extreme necessity: “The Jurists (fuqaha) have stated that in the case of extreme necessity and when there is no alternative available, even unlawful things, such as pork and alcohol, become permissible. However, even in such a situation, consuming or deriving benefit from a human body still remains unlawful.”

So that’s that. If Allah wants you to be blind, you’ll be blind, and you should simply accept that without trying to change it. In all the controversy these days about Sharia, and continued efforts from leftist and Muslim spokesmen to claim that it is entirely benign and that only racist, bigoted “Islamophobes” think otherwise, no one has broached the possibility that if Sharia continues to expand its presence and influence in the U.S., we might end up with a significant increase in blind people. But if that’s Allah’s will, it’s Allah’s will, and we just have to accept that, right?