The multidisciplinary nature of bioethical inquiry leads to a crisis of epistemology and legitimacy. It is not clear how much weight should be accorded to the reality on the ground (what is) when considering the moral ordering of society (what should be). Hence an overstated, but nevertheless pertinent, tension exists between religious authorities and philosophers on the one hand, who consider moral reasoning to have normative value independent of social reality, and social scientists on the other, who describe contextually-driven human ethical decision-making. The epistemological and lexical challenges for an “Islamic” bioethics are arguably still more profound, because notions about moral norms, the good, and the ethical are scattered across different Islamic sciences including moral theology (uṣūl al-fiqh), scholastic theology (ʿilm al-kalām), jurisprudence and law (fiqh), as well as within various genres and practices related to moral formation and spiritual development (taṣawwuf and adab).The “Islamic” character of Islamic bioethics is thus also debated. As the academic study of religion has come to deploy social science-based methods for examining the lived experiences and meaning-making activities of religious communities, the primacy of the analysis of religious texts for understanding religion has become contested.