The COBHUNI project will for the first time provide a comprehensive investigation of the History of the Unborn in Islam until today. This aims at diversifying our understanding of how pre-natal life is conceptualized in texts of Islamic normativity. The project will study the imaginations of the unborn in Islam diachronically and across regions.[more]
Contemporary Islamic deliberations relating to bioethical questions have received increasing academic attention over the last years due to the rapid advances in the field of medicine and of research. The COBHUNI project challenges the essentializing and simplifying way the imaginations of the unborn in Islam are treated. [more]
Photo: seier+seier/creativecommons/flickr
Project Phases
The COBHUNI Project is structured in five phases, each of 12 month duration, from full assessment of thethe complexity of Hadith material relating to the unborn in a first step through analysis of the material along different axes and assessing the axes together in a further phase up to situating the imaginations of the unborn in space and time. [more]
Photo: Zeutschel
How will COBHUNI proceed?
COBHUNI will follow up on roughly 20 Qur’an passages and Hadiths that have been identified in prelimary research - a much broader corpus than the three passages that are usually referred to in the contemporary concept of “Islamic embryology”.The COBHUNI project will follow up on these passages across regions through the history of Islam until today along a defined matrix. [more]
COBHUNI approaches by putting the Qur’anic and Hadith material relating to the imaginations of the unborn and the exegetical tradition which evolved around them until today into the center. The investigations into these texts have uncovered very rich material relating to theological debates, legal questions, discussion of medical issues and social processes. [more]
