Sushil Kutty
As the hijab controversy simmers and the Karnataka High Court hears the case whether wearing the hijab is essential practice in Islam, there are people who are asking if a recent breakthrough in heart transplants involving the heart of a pig does not tell a story to be heard and digested ? That said, anybody with rudimentary understanding of Islam will know that pig and pork—the meat of pig—are ‘haram’ in Islam and no good Muslim will be seen dead with a pig forget living with a pig heart beating in his breast. But, what if there is another story that urges not to be stuck in hard positions?
To get to that, let’s first agree that many of Islam’s rules are strict and the bifurcation of ‘halal’ and ‘haram’ is irrefutable. Pig meat or pork is unequivocally ‘haram’. Islamic scholar Dr. Zakir Naik says pigs are mentioned four times in the Holy Quran and every time Allah labels it `haram’. Naik says consumption of pork is behind many of the ills that plague pig-eaters. He says even the Bible agrees pig is unhealthy but is the favourite food of millions.
That said, it can be only in the West that the pig is put to better use than anywhere else. So much so, now there is a human being on planet earth in whom a pig heart beats! This person’s diseased human heart was replaced with a pig heart.
This was January 2022. Bartley Griffith, cardiothoracic surgeon, and one of his colleagues at the University of Maryland’s Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program, had been working together on the pig-heart transplant project for five years. And they did the impossible this year. But that was not the only standout about the operation.
The other “unique” thing was that Dr. Griffith’s colleague in the world’s first transplantation of a pig’s heart in a human being, 57-year-old David Bennet Sr., was Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, a Muslim! Now, where does that leave science and progress, haram and halal, the tenets of religion which are written on stone, irrefutable and irreplaceable?
In fact, Mohiuddin, perhaps, had a bigger role to play than Dr. Griffith. Preparations for the transplant began on January 1, 2022. All the members of Griffith’s team were given the consent to opt out if they wanted to. At the end of the day, 400 wanted to participate and that included Mohiuddin, for whom his religion told him the pig is haram and not to be even touched, much less held in the hand.
But Mohiuddin was the one who led the “lab work” for the transplant. He was the one who studied the pig-heart transplantation. He had spent 30 years studying hearts and all that experience was about to come to a head. That morning of January 7, there was no room for haram and halal in his thoughts as he led the team which extracted the heart from a year-old genetically-modified pig.
Mohiuddin had relocated to the United States from Pakistan in 1991. He was 26. And he began training in cardiac surgery. But then, someone posed this question to him: “How many patients can you help as a cardiac surgeon; what if you’re in a field where you’ll be able to help a hundred times more patients?”
Thus began Mohiuddin’s research work in transplanting organs from animal to animal. Many times there were problems associated with transplant research and funding; there were times when he was told to stop work and not waste his time. Today, after all those doubts on whether he had taken the right decision, he is a very satisfied man.
By then he had been working on transplanting pig hearts into baboons and the baboons were “thriving, even after 945 days.” This opened the door to FDA approval for pig heart transplants in humans. Pigs, says Mohiuddin, are preferred because their circulatory system is like that of a human, the size of pig heart is nearly the same size as a man’s; they grow up fast, breed easily and are “sweet and emotional.”
That being said, according to media reports, Mohiuddin is deeply religious, and he listens to the Quran while driving to work. He admits that being a Muslim, for him pork is a complete “no-no” and that in his family nobody even talked of pigs and pork. In fact, when he first started working with pig hearts, there was “resistance” from his family, prompting him to talk to religious leaders, who told him saving lives took precedence.
Back home in his country, Pakistan, Mohiuddin has met with mixed response, he is celebrated as well as criticised. The moral of the story, however, is that nothing is more essential than saving lives and, now, that is Mohiuddin’s prime belief—saving lives. In India, now, it’s a choice between a veil and a veil over education. IPA Services