Supporters of Schiavo want her left alone. (Reuters)

FLORIDA, March 22, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A US federal judge refused Tuesday, March 22, to order the resumption of tube feeding for brain-damaged Florida woman Terri Schiavo after weighing the highly charged right-to-die case.

In denying the emergency request by attorneys for Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, federal Judge James Whittemore wrote that they did not have a “substantial likelihood of success” on the merits of their arguments, according to CNN.

“This court concludes that Theresa Schiavo's life and liberty interests were adequately protected by the extensive process provided in the state courts,” the judge wrote.

He, however, acknowledged the “gravity of the consequences of denying injunctive relief.”

“Even under these difficult and time strained circumstances, however, and not withstanding Congress' expressed interest in the welfare of Theresa Schiavo, this court is constrained to apply the law to the issues before it,” the ruling said.

The ruling in Tampa by Whittemore came after Congress and President George W. Bush enacted legislation aimed at allowing federal courts to review Schiavo's case, CNN reported.

Doctors have said Terri Schiavo could live for one to two weeks without her feeding tube.

Attorneys for Schiavo's parents will file an appeal at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia.

The case reignited the controversial issue that has been tossed several names like mercy-killing and euthanasia, and brought the argument back to the fore.

Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had sought an emergency order for the feeding tube keeping the 41-year-old woman alive to be reattached, three days after her husband had a Florida state judge order it taken off, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported earlier Tuesday.

Before the ruling and after a two-hour hearing on the parent’s request for reconnecting the feeding tube of their brain-damaged daughter, Whittemore refused to make an immediate decision on the controversial case, saying he would “not tell where, how or when” he would issue his ruling.

Schiavo has been kept alive since a 1990 heart failure damaged her brain. Doctors have said in a long series of court battles over the case that Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state, unable to speak or help herself.

Michael Schiavo says his wife told him prior to her accident that she would never desire to be kept alive artificially.

But her parents say their daughter could improve with proper treatment and have questioned Michael Schiavo's fitness to serve as his wife’s guardian.

Bush cut short his holiday to sign into law an emergency bill allowing Schiavo's parents to take the case to federal court. (Reuters)

The Vatican condemned the US ruling, saying that human beings cannot play God.

By removing the tube, the US federal judge has made Schiavo look like a “damaged house appliance,” CNN quoted the Vatican as saying in a statement.

The Schindlers, who are Roman Catholics, argued several violations of their daughter’s rights, including the right to due process and to practice a religion, Reuters reported.

The parents’ campaign to keep her alive was joined in recent weeks by anti-abortion activists and Christian conservatives who lobbied intensely in Washington to win lawmakers’ support.

The case of the brain-damaged Florida patient has sparked a political controversy in the United States.

Cutting short his holiday in Texas, Bush rushed back to Washington Sunday, March 20, to follow the case and signed into law an emergency bill passed by Congress early Monday, allowing Schiavo's parents to take the case to federal court in a bid to keep her alive.

“In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life,” Bush said in a statement.

US Congressional leaders brushed aside concerns of overstepping their constitutional limits and government intrusion into family affairs.

“The legal issues, I grant everyone, are complicated, but the moral ones are not,” said Tom DeLay, leader of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

“Terri Schiavo is not brain dead; she talks and she laughs and she expresses happiness and discomfort.”

An ABC News poll showed the extraordinary congressional intervention into a legal dispute was opposed by the majority of Americans, most of whom believed politicians were using Schiavo for political gain.

Islam’s stance is clear on the issue and divides euthanasia into two categories: active euthanasia and passive euthanasia. The first refers to an act that leads to death like giving a patient a fatal injection to hasten his death.

The latter is the negative attitude taken with the aim of hastening death for the patient; this can be by withholding or withdrawing water, food, drugs, medical or surgical procedures, resuscitation like CPR, and life support such as the respirator. The patient is then left to die from the underlying disease.

Some Muslim scholars maintain that all types of euthanasia are forbidden as they run counter to noble principles of Islamic Jurisprudence that are deducted from the textual evidence, i.e. from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s Tradition.

Prominent Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi states that positive euthanasia or so-called “mercy killing” is forbidden in Islam as it encompasses a positive role on the part of the physician to end the life of the patient and hasten his death via lethal injection, electric shock, a sharp weapon or any other way. This is an act of murder, and murder is a major sin in Islam, the religion of pure mercy.