Cultivating Human Rights: Islamic Law and the Humanist Imperative

Abstract

My chapter will focus on the interface, interaction, and tensions between the human rights tradition and the Islamic tradition. Both of these traditions—human rights and Islam—make normative demands upon all rational beings, and these demands are articulations of expectations regarding what counts as appropriate or inappropriate conduct in an endless range of contexts and social, economic, and political settings. Both traditions attempt to create normative cultures that define standards of ethics, morality, and even legality. In addition, both traditions make their claims in the name of humanity—in other words, both claim that their normative demands ought to be believed and adopted, ought to earn deference and compliance, and ought to be accepted and acted upon for the good of humanity; both claim that, overall, human beings will prosper and be better off if they accept the legitimacy and the binding nature of the respective traditions. The question that interests me here is whether these two systems of belief are mutually exclusive. I do not intend to hold the response to this question in suspense; the answer is that it entirely depends on the substantive natures of the particular systems of religious and human rights beliefs, that is, on how extensive, expansive, or even intrusive each is.