Islam and Human Rights

Abstract

Professor Mayer' second edition of her Islam and Human Rights, like theftrst edition, aims essentially to study comparatively "selected civil and politicalrights formulations in international law and in actual and proposed rightsschemes purporting to embody Islamic principles, with a critical appraisal of thelatter in terms of international law and Islamic jurisprudence" (p. xi). Whileacknowledging that the title of her book is misleading (because it is not onlyIslam that determines a Muslim's attitude), by the end of the book the readerfinds that the different conservative interpretations of Islam that developed duringthe Middle Ages and are kept within authoritacjve books of jurisprudence are made responsible for Muslims’ dealing with human rights issues. However, theauthor does not elaborate much on the repression of secular regimes, whichadhere neither to international human rights nor to medieval Islamic legal thinking.The question then relates not to Islam as such, but to the nature of politicsthat is being exercised, whether in the name of Islam or secularism.Mayer is emphatic in not attributing repression to Islam and is very keen torecognize the multiplicity of ideas and trends within the Islamic world todaytoward the issues of human rights. But what unifies these different trends is theirheavy reliance on religious principles of Islamic sources-meaning medievalbooks of jurisprudence and not the Qur’an or the Sunnah. For Islam, whateverthat may mean to the author, is used for both political protest against undemocraticregimes and for repression by these regimes. In other words, Islam has notspecified what is equivalent to international human rights and has no properscheme for human rights. But had the author looked at the original texts of theQur’an and the Sunnah, she could have developed a scheme of rights that thencould be compared to the international human rights standards. Again, themedieval Islamic literature is not devoid of a scheme of rights, though they maynot be exactly what she wants to label as a scheme of human rights ...