As a contemporary political issue related to Islam, human rights is often invoked as an international legal yardstick to which some states with Muslim majorities, particularly in the Middle East, are seen, particularly by Westerners, to fall short. Related to this, some Muslims and their governments argue that aspects of contemporary human rights law reflect a Western neoimperialist political slant. Tensions along these lines usually center on political liberties, religious freedom, and women’s rights.
Looking mostly at real or alleged shortfalls in Middle Eastern governments’ enforcement of contemporary rights law, however, obscures both the fact that perceived violations may have little to do with Islam per se and the historical importance of Islam’s role in bringing varied issues of equality and justice to the fore of many premodern societies. Given Islam’s strong foundational and doctrinal strains of social and economic justice, religion has been and can be linked with providing greater equality or addressing severe poverty in Muslim-majority societies.
Early Muslim texts and legal scholars did not use the modern Western political term “human rights” (ḥuqūq al-insān), nor did they envision current core concepts of human rights, which generally are specific privileges that individuals enjoy in relation to nation-states in which they are citizens or residents. In classical Islam, individual rights came about as the duty of a divinely sanctioned ruler of a transnational community of Muslims, and of protected non-Muslims, to realize God’s will through justice, fairness, and enhanced economic equality.
Islam, as a social system that has combined belief, political order, and flexible mechanisms for growth and evolution, represented a progressive social force in its early history for its ability to enhance women’s status, institutionalize charity, and allow for separate, if unequal, privileges for some religious minority communities within its midst; these are all also central issues in contemporary human rights discourse. Indeed, believers assert that the shari‘a need not enact specific provisions that institutionalize injustice, as justice is at the very core of Islam and its sociopolitical system.
Of course, such a principle could often produce idealized discourse among legal scholars based on the assumption that rulers would not needlessly do injustice to their subjects. Moreover, the rationalist, individualist foundations of contemporary rights language were not an obvious centerpiece of Islamic jurisprudence, or any other premodern religious system for that matter. In addition, the basic governing norms of the diverse historical empires ruling in the name of Islam, such as the Abbasids, Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids, varied with respect to individual rights. Thus historical context and changes in the connection of human rights to Islam must be part of any analysis of this subject.
In the contemporary era of postcolonial states, the implementation of codified international legal standards of universal human rights is affected by four primary factors. First, many states with Muslim majority populations have explicitly endorsed, in their constitutions or otherwise, Islam as the prime source of legislation, including in regard to laws that involve rights. Ironically, however, this endorsement has been accompanied in most Islamic countries by the relegation of actual shari‘a to the sphere of family law, if even there. Yet, Islam as a source of legal ideals and a tradition of diverse thinking about rights and justice is perhaps even more significant and potent in spurring debate on these issues because it typically lacks substantive realization in many areas of contemporary legal practice.
A second factor affecting human rights is dominant social customs that are often associated with Islam by native Muslims and outsiders but that generally are not required by the religion. Issues surrounding women’s status are the most frequent way in which this factor plays out with respect to contemporary rights. Oftentimes, creative solutions within Islamic legal traditions and methods allow for social practices prevalent in Islamic history, especially issues surrounding the status of women, such as polygyny and unequal divorce rights, to be reformulated in relative conformity to human rights law.
Third, global tensions around the politics of Islamic states or social movements, particularly between the West and Arab and other Southwest Asian Islamic areas, encourages miscommunication and exaggeration with respect to human rights standards. Such tensions include concerns about the rights of Muslims in Western states around issues such as national security law in the United States or women’s headscarves in Europe.
Fourth, and perhaps of greatest importance, the relatively unaccountable and frequently repressive political systems of many Arab and some other Muslim states, which affect and constrain the rule of law more broadly, are often the real reason for human rights violations and impoverished rights discourse rather than anything connected to Islam. Taken together, these four factors help make sense of the general and specific political disputes around human rights and Islam and also amplify that Islam as a broad, global religion is not per se in clear tension with international rights. This helps make sense of the importance of rights claims as part of the discourse of Muslim Arabs who took to the streets in 2011 to challenge repressive political systems.
This is not to deny real tensions between the interpretation or textual formulations of some human rights law and contemporary Islam. If areas of alleged Islamic difficulty with women’s rights are often, in fact, contestable and broadly reconcilable within Islam’s emphasis on social justice and equality, some particular provisions of international rights law with respect to religious freedom are more problematic. Specifically, Islamic law has not allowed conversion out of Islam or for Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, both of which are recognized as freedoms individuals enjoy under human rights law (e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles 16 and 18 and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights articles 18 and 27). More generally, and given the four factors previously noted, tensions between Islam and contemporary international rights law may exist based on questions about the moral or pragmatic authority of a nonreligious, non-Islamic positivist legal process to determine rights. Additionally, it may seem inappropriate to ground rights in politics and institutions rather than as a consequence of religious obligation. Of course, such broad tensions are scarcely unique to Islam.
Thus, navigating the terrain of Islam and contemporary international human rights challenges Muslims themselves to negotiate the specific relation of global rights law standards to particular local contexts and practices and also challenges non-Muslims and Muslims alike to recognize how domestic, regional, and global politics can magnify or create disputes and misunderstandings that are not inherent in Islam’s diverse historical experiences of seeking fairness and justice for individuals. The increasing diversification of Muslim societies and communities throughout traditional Islamic heartlands and the West increases opportunities for lively, sophisticated, and varied debates about the rapport between Islam and human rights.
Further Reading
Abdullahi An-Na’im and Mashood A. Baderin, eds., Islam and Human Rights: Selected Essays of Abdullahi An-Na’im, 2010; Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights, 2006; Chibli Mallat, Introduction to Middle Eastern Law, 2007; Ann Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, 2006; Irene Oh, The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics, 2007; “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr.
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