May a Muslim donate organs, and direct it in a will?

The widest of the four. The Shafi’i books carry “some latitude in benefiting from the parts and limbs of a human being when he is dead”: a person in dire need may eat the flesh of a protected corpse, which al-Nawawi calls the sounder and better-known of two ways, against a second way he dismisses as “nothing”. The reason given is the one every modern permission rests on — the sanctity of the living is weightier than the sanctity of the dead. Al-Shafi’i went further than anyone: a man in necessity may cut a piece from his own body and eat it where the danger in cutting is less than the danger in leaving it — and the encyclopaedia records that the rest of the jurists differed with him there. Even so the school stops at commerce and at indignity: a human hide is not made usable by tanning, “for his honour”, and human limbs are not property.

Inside the majority permission, with a dissenting view. The encyclopaedia reports the majority as allowing a starving person to use the flesh of a dead human being, on the reasoning that the living person’s sanctity is higher than the dead person’s — and names “a view among the Hanbalis”, alongside some Hanafis, as excepting the protected corpse from that permission, which is precisely the case a Muslim donor presents. With the Shafi’is they treat a person whose blood is forfeit as they treat a corpse. A report from Ahmad joins the other schools in holding that tanning purifies any hide except a pig’s and a human being’s, and they add the hides of predators. Human limbs are not property.

No benefit may be taken from the limbs of the dead. The Hanafis are recorded as holding, in terms, that it is not permissible to benefit from the limbs of a dead person, while permitting medical use of the parts of any animal except the pig and the human being. “Some of the Hanafis” are named as excepting the protected corpse even from the majority’s starvation permission, and some of them treat a person of forfeit blood as a corpse. They too hold that tanning does not make a human hide usable, and that a human being’s limbs are not property. On the one part the jurists argued over — a mother’s expressed milk — the Hanafis are among those refusing its sale, al-Kasani giving the reason that “the milk is a part of a human being, and a human being in all his parts is honoured and venerated, and it is no part of that honour and veneration to cheapen him by sale and purchase”.

No — alone among the four. Where the other three schools let a starving person use the flesh of a dead human being, the encyclopaedia records the Malikis flatly: “the Malikis held that it is not permitted”. That refusal is the classical high-water mark of the inviolability of the corpse, and it is the position from which the modern prohibitions are easiest to argue. They likewise hold that a human hide is not made usable by tanning, for his honour, and that human limbs are not property.