Eye Donation and Family Consent, How to Talk to Your Family

Making the pledge is the easy part. It takes one phone call. The hard part arrives months or years later, in a hospital corridor, when your relatives are asked a question nobody prepared them for. In Pakistan, eye donation and family consent are not two separate subjects. They are one subject, and the conversation that settles it has to happen at home, long before anybody is grieving.

Why a pledge nobody knows about rarely becomes a donation

Picture the actual moment. A death in the family, a house filling with visitors, arrangements to be made within hours. Somebody would have to remember a decision you mentioned once, find a number, and make a call while they are in shock. If your relatives have never heard you say it, they will almost certainly say no, and they will be right to, because nobody should agree on your behalf to something they do not understand.

That is the real barrier in this country. It is not disbelief and it is not the law. It is a family who were never told. Which also means that eye donation and family consent is something you can genuinely fix, this week, at your own dinner table.

What scholars said at Dow University in Karachi, and who said what

Most families stall on the religious question, so start there rather than avoiding it. On 10 April 2025, Dawn reported a seminar hosted by Dow University of Health Sciences in Karachi at which Islamic scholars and medical professionals signed a joint declaration affirming that Islam permits organ donation after death as a means to save or improve other human lives. The report, by Imtiaz Ali, records the declaration’s own wording, that donating organs after death, with proper consent and ethical compliance, is not only allowed but is also considered an act of sadaqah jariyah, ongoing charity, in Islamic teachings. You can read Dawn’s report in full.

Read it for what it is. That seminar was about organ donation after death, and much of the discussion turns on brain death, which is a different medical situation from the one in which a cornea is recovered. It is not a ruling about corneas. A corneal donation happens after death has already occurred. It involves no decision about life support and no doctor’s judgment about when to stop treatment. Say that plainly if somebody at the table thinks a pledge gives a hospital a say over when treatment stops. It does not, and it cannot. What makes it so useful at your kitchen table is something else. It names individual scholars, and it records what each of them actually said.

Dawn reports that Council of Islamic Ideology chairman Allama Raghib Hussain Naeemi said brain death should be confirmed by doctors, and that once brain death is declared, organ donation can proceed with prior consent or the family’s approval. Allama Muhammad Khan Sherani is reported as acknowledging that Islam permitted organ donation, while urging that the process be carried out with utmost caution given the ethical complexities involved. Allama Shahenshah Naqvi is reported as saying that because Islam highly values the sanctity of life, donating organs to save lives is permissible provided the donor is not harmed. Mufti Ramzan Sialvi is reported as referring to the principle of choosing the lesser of two harms, and as saying organ donation is permissible if the dignity of the deceased is preserved. Mufti Mazhar Fareed is reported as stressing the donor’s intention and the respectful handling of organs.

Those are five positions held by five named people, each with its own emphasis. Do not flatten them into a sentence beginning with the words scholars agree. If an uncle wants to know exactly who said what, the answer is in the report and you can hand him the page.

What the Council of Islamic Ideology said about the cornea

There is a more recent statement, and this one is specifically about the cornea rather than about organs in general. The News reported on 1 July 2026, in a report by Rana Ghulam Qadir, that at a meeting of the Council of Islamic Ideology chaired by Allama Dr Muhammad Raghib Hussain Naeemi, and keeping medical necessity in view, the council declared that the donation and transplantation of the human cornea are permissible under the Islamic law, subject to specific conditions and safeguards.

That final clause about conditions and safeguards is part of the finding, and we carry it every time we repeat the sentence. We also keep the two things apart. The 2026 council position concerns the cornea. The 2025 seminar declaration concerns organ donation after death. Stretching either one to cover the other helps nobody.

One point about the council itself, because it changes how the sentence should be read. The Council of Islamic Ideology is constituted under Article 228 of the Constitution of Pakistan, and Article 230 sets out what it does. It makes recommendations to Parliament and the Provincial Assemblies, and it advises them on whether a proposed law is repugnant to the Injunctions of Islam. It is an advisory and law reform body. It does not issue fatwas, and what it says is not a binding ruling on any individual’s case.

Not every Pakistani scholar agrees, and some darul iftas take a more restrictive view. This page reports only the positions we could verify in named national reporting, and it is not a survey of the field. The largest darul iftas in Karachi are not among the sources here, and their positions on organ donation and on brain death are not reported because we have not read them in a source we could verify. If your own mufti takes a different view from the ones reported here, that is not a mistake to be corrected on a hospital’s blog.

PEBS is a hospital and an eye bank. It does not issue religious rulings and this article is not a fatwa. We are reporting what named scholars and a named advisory body have been reported to say. If your family wants a ruling that fits your own circumstances, take the question to a scholar you trust and ask it directly. That is a good outcome, not a failure of the conversation.

Raise it while everyone is well

Do not save this for a hospital waiting room. Raise it on an ordinary evening when nobody is ill and nothing is at stake. A death in the news, a friend’s cataract operation, or this article open on your phone is reason enough to begin.

Keep it short. Say that you have thought about it, that you have pledged or intend to, and that you wanted them to hear it from you first. People handle a plain statement far better than a long argument.

Say why, not only what

Your reason will persuade your family more than any fact you can quote at them. Perhaps it is that PEBS states a single pledge can give two people the gift of sight. Perhaps it is somebody in your own street who has waited years in the dark. Perhaps it is simply that you will have no use for it and someone else will.

Notice too that in the position Dawn attributes to the CII chairman, consent is built into the answer itself. Donation proceeds with prior consent or the family’s approval. A pledge is a wish you have recorded, not an instrument that overrules the people standing beside you. Saying that out loud tends to settle a family faster than anything else in the conversation, because it tells them they are being included rather than bypassed. That is the whole point of treating eye donation and family consent as one question instead of two.

Name the hospital and name the number

Vagueness is what kills a pledge. Be specific enough that a relative could act quickly, and know who to call. Tell them the hospital is PEBS in Shadman Town, North Karachi, which describes itself on its homepage as a multidisciplinary charitable hospital delivering eye care, cancer surgery and dialysis. Tell them the number to call is 021-36908053, which PEBS publishes on its contact page along with its address in Sector 14-B, Shadman Town. Tell them that PEBS lists its hours as Monday to Saturday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Then ask PEBS, on the call when you pledge, what your family should do if a death occurs outside those published hours, and write the answer down beside the number. A death does not wait for an OPD to open, and the answer to that question is the one your family will actually need.

Then write it all down. A note in the family file, a line in your phone, a message in the family group. Anywhere that is not only your own memory.

Let the religious question be asked out loud

The worst version of this conversation is the one where everybody nods and nobody says what is actually worrying them. Ask directly whether anyone has a religious concern, and let the answer be yes. PEBS states on its eye donation page that when you call to record a pledge the team will answer your questions, including religious and family concerns, and that they are always happy to discuss them. Your relatives can make that call themselves. They do not have to take your word for any of it.

If your family says no today

Then it is no today, and you have still done something worthwhile. You have put the question in the room and told them where you stand. Families change their minds slowly, and usually after a second conversation rather than a first one. Do not turn it into an argument you win, because a pledge honoured under protest is not what anybody wanted.

If it goes the other way, and somebody in the house wants to do something rather than simply agree to something, the PEBS volunteer page lists roles at medical camps, at school and community screenings and at the hospital, and states that both medical and non medical roles are available and that no medical background is required.

One more thing before you close this page

This conversation is about somebody else’s sight after you are gone. Your own eyes are today’s business, and they are easy to neglect while you are being generous about the future. If your vision has changed, if reading has become harder, or if something has been bothering you for weeks, please speak to an eye specialist about your own eyes, and call PEBS Hospital on 021-36908053 during opening hours to book a time.

This article is general information and does not replace an examination by an eye doctor.