Modified foods and cloned plants: who sets the limits?

This lesson asks you to analyse the social, ethical and legal issues raised by an application of biotechnology in health, agriculture or the environment. The museum offers two applications in food, genetically modified foods of animal origin and the cloning of plant cells, as two rulings answered them. Other applications, such as genetically modified crops or in vitro fertilization, and the laws of Canada, are for your class to bring. ¹

List the people and things the answer says must not be harmed, and the people it names as able to judge the benefit and harm. Then ask what a law, as opposed to a ruling, would add.

Read the answer of Jordan's General Iftaa Department slowly. The Department answered that scholars define plant cloning as a biological process forming a group of cells that yields a plant with improved output which reproduces without any change to its genetic content, and that the earth and what is on it were made subservient for human benefit, with humans commanded to set it right and avoid corrupting it ². It said the scope the Sharia allows for non-human cloning is set by two words: securing benefits and warding off harms, with the judgment of these referred to experts and specialists; if the process improves the plant and its output without harm to the consumer or disruption of the plant ecosystem, there is no objection, but if it leads to harm to people or disrupts the plant ecosystem, it is not permitted ². It cited the resolution of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy at its tenth session in Jeddah in 1997 ². This is what the Department says and the reasoning it gives; the museum issues no ruling of its own.

It is easy to take cloning and genetic modification for one thing. The two records define them differently. Jordan's General Iftaa Department says that scholars define plant cloning as a process that yields a plant which reproduces without any change to its genetic content ². The International Islamic Fiqh Academy defined genetically modified foods of animal origin as products taken from living animals whose genetic material has been altered by genetic engineering, by inserting genes from other animals or by deleting, modifying or rearranging genes ³. Each body rules on its own subject as it defines it, and the museum attributes each definition to the body that gave it.

The International Islamic Fiqh Academy, an organ of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, adopted its text as resolution 266 at its 26th session in Doha (6–10 Dhu al-Qa'da 1446, 4–8 May 2025), and published it on iifa-aifi.org ³. Jordan's General Iftaa Department published its fatwa on aliftaa.jo as no. 4010, dated 6 October 2025 ². It answers a question, and it refers the judgment of benefit and harm to experts and specialists without naming them ². In the record on the mufti, the TDV encyclopaedia says that a fatwa is advice and explains the law, so the mufti cannot force the questioner to act on it, while a judge's ruling binds the parties and is enforced by the state ⁴. So both texts are a resolution and a fatwa attributed to the bodies that issued them, not a law.

The Department says the scope of non-human cloning is set by securing benefits and warding off harms, with the judgment referred to experts and specialists ², and the Academy sets as conditions that the methods be safe and that the necessary information be disclosed ³. Take a position on who, as these texts present it, has the authority to decide that a particular application does harm or good, and answer the strongest objection to it: if the judgment of harm and benefit is referred to experts, what is left for the body that issues the ruling?

• Resolution 266 of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy: the definition of genetically modified foods of animal origin and the three conditions.
• Jordan's fatwa on cloning plants: the question, the answer and its reasoning.
• The mufti: what the TDV encyclopaedia says about how a fatwa differs from a judge's ruling.

Read the record on cloning plants and write the two conditions it sets, each in your own words, with one question you would ask an expert about each.