Islamic jurisprudence and the end of XXXX life.

@entity1 @entity1353 @entity3474 @entity1620 @entity204 @entity5084
Death is an inevitable reality but the causes leading to @entity204 may vary from individual to individual. In the past, @entity204 was considered to be a simple and straightforward phenomenon. The general practitioner would issue the @entity204 certificate once he was convinced that there was cessation or absence of spontaneous life in the @entity1 . This meant that the @entity1 had stopped @entity1353 , his heart had stopped beating, there was unresponsiveness, his body had turned cold and finally @entity5084 had set in. With the successful accomplishment of heart transplants, it became obvious that a process of rethinking on how @entity204 could be determined had to be instituted. Cessation of heartbeat is no longer considered evidence of @entity204 since the heart is now able to be substituted with that of a just-deceased donor or with that of a @entity3474 or even with a mechanical one. Moreover, modern biomedical innovations like the resuscitator and cardiac pacemaker have made it imperative to establish a set of criteria by which the moment of @entity204 could be identified. Diagnosis of @entity204 is relevant to the issue of retrieving viable vital organs, i.e. heart, lung, liver and kidney, for transplantation purposes. The Holy Qur'an emphasizes the universality of @entity204 and from its teachings one gathers that the moment of @entity204 would be at the time when the soul is separated from the body. However, one has to concede that the Qur'an does not in any way tell us anything about the nature of the soul nor of its location in the @entity1 body, hence the dilemma of Muslims insofar as @entity1620 is concerned. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyse the deliberations of the classical and contemporary Muslim scholars on the end of @entity1 life with the aim of determining whether brain stem @entity204 could in effect be regarded by Muslims as the end of @entity1 life and if not why?
