Artificial Insemination

It is a fundamental principle of Islamic Jurisprudence that one must avoid imposing upon one’s physical body actions that are usually considered to be unnatural and unconventional unless there is a dire necessity for doing so. For instance, the human body is accustomed to acquiring its food and drink orally through the gullet, but there are times when, due to certain ailments, food cannot be given to a patient orally. In such cases, the patient is then fed intravenously. Oral feeding is the conventional method whereas the intravenous one will be considered to be the unconventional one. 

Shari’ah only permits the intravenous method due to necessity as a person cannot usually survive without food and drink. In the absence of necessity, Shari’ah does not recommend the usage of unconventional methods of infusing objects into the body. That brings us to your question regarding artificial insemination. As all the modern methods of artificial insemination (GIFT, IVF, IVI and ICSI) aren’t conventional methods of inducing neither fertilization nor are these procedures a matter of life and death. Opting for these procedures would be against the principles of Shari’ah.

Firstly, the male will be required to extract sperm through masturbation. This is not permissible. In the event the sperm is extracted lawfully, the female will be required to expose her Awrah (those parts of a one’s body which is impermissible to expose to a stranger) to the doctor.  One is only allowed to expose the Awrah to a doctor in the case of dire necessity, which does not exist here. 

However, if a husband, personally artificially extracted eggs from his wife’s ovaries and then mixed them with his own sperm before injecting them into his wife’s fallopian tubes, or if the husband himself implanted embryos into her uterus (as in the IVI and ICSI methods), then, provided that the husband does not acquire the sperm through masturbation (which is prohibited), but rather by collecting it in a condom during intercourse or into a container using the coitus interrupts method or in some other way, then although these methods would not be Haraam, they will still be discouraged and regarded as undesirable and abominable due to them being unnatural and unconventional methods of inducing fertilization. However, in the case where these procedures are carried out by a doctor, which is more likely, many aspects of it will be considered to be prohibited by the Shari’ah.

Hadhrat Mufti Mahmood Hasan Saheb Gangohi  Rahmatullahi alaih has also strongly condemned these unnatural and artificial insemination procedures, as can be noted from his Fataawaa.

[Ref: Fataawaa Mahmudiyya, Vol. 5, and Pg. 151 & 162; also Vol.12, Pg. 345].