Thread by @Tweetistorian

The focus of this thread is this question: Are human rights a modern invention? This depends on your definition of human rights. If you believe human rights are exactly like we’ve them today in international law, then yes, that is modern. You can’t project those on the past.
~aym

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1448764714863955968

To compare modern human rights law to Islam is to compare two things that developed in separate contexts, even though Muslim countries were deeply involved in developing modern international human rights law. This comparison is therefore about Islam *and* human rights.

~aym

But as we’ll see, ethical religions like Islam also developed over the centuries their own concepts of human rights. Both as a moral and legal concept, and already in medieval times. And it is of course this aspect of Islam we should compare to modern human rights discourse.
~aym

To determine an effective thick
description of Islam, and a strategy for comparative studies, it’s therefore important to separate these into two distinct discourses:

Islamic human rights discourse and ‘Islam and human rights’ discourse.

~aym

’
Islamic human rights discourse is an internal discourse on human
rights that is not pressured by external forces or ideologies. It is a discourse on Muslims’ own terms, emerging organically from their own worldview. Here human rights is not Islam its Other.

~aym

‘Islam and human rights’ discourse on the other hand emerged together with the emergence of the modern human rights regimes,
and has been a constant external pressure on Muslims to reform ‘Islam(ic law)’. Here human rights is seen as Islam its Other.

~aym

So do Muslims have their own human rights discourse within premodern Islamic thought? Yes they have. The premodern Islamic human rights discourse was developed within Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) as a duty-claim scheme. Rights are reciprocatory, they go both ways.

~aym

Therefore a coherence
was sought between what humans can claim as their right (such as a right to property) and the duty of other humans to fulfill and protect that right (e.g. not to steal that property and to punish the thief who does steal it).

~aym

These claim-rights were labeled ḥuqūq al-ʿibād representing personal human rights, and these public duty-rights as ḥuqūq al-ʿāmm, representing societal human rights.

~aym

But within Islam, being a theistic religion, God is also viewed as having a personhood who can make claims on His creations as divine rights (ḥuqūq Allāh) and who performs duties towards them.

~aym

But He neither needs His rights, nor is He obliged to perform anything that is not grounded within His own nature (there can be no external duty on Him).

~aym

Divine rights came to represent God’s subjective claim rights in relation to creed and worship (ʿibādāt) through which God makes a subjective claim on mankind to
show “thankfulness to the benefactor” as He created them and endowed them with reason and benefit.

~aym

Human rights are technically unlimited as they are defined as “every claim-rights other than divine claim-rights”. Meaning what constitutes human rights is open-ended while divine rights are determined and close-ended.

~aym

God being self-sufficient means He is transcendent above any need or want. Therefore divine rights are based on leniency. This, of course, is not the same for human rights, on which human existence depends for survival and prosperity, which were therefore deemed necessary.

~aym

The presence of human rights in the world to is be viewed as that of scarcity (shuḥḥ), paucity (ḍīq), and that they are easily undermined (ḍanna), and therefore need to be protected by all means.

It is this difference between creator and creation which was also projected unto the claims and duties linked to each ontology, creating a hierarchy of no-need (God) versus need (humanity) within the Islamic rights scheme. As expressed by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210):

“And it is known that the obligatory duties fall into two categories: divine rights and human rights. Divine rights are based on liberality because the Exalted is in no need of creation, and human rights are those which necessitates reserved caution concerning them.” (Al-Rāzī)

Human rights were seen as ontologically established within every born human, whether they are a child or insane, representing a natural rights scheme, as expressed by the Ḥanafīte Abū Bakr al-Sarakhsī (d. 490/1097):

This classical human rights discourse was therefore uniquely both duty-and claim rights based, while the majority of classical Western philosophical and Christian discourse was focused on public duties upheld by the ruler and rarely saw the individual as a bearer of rights.

~aym

Although many elements of the Islamic rights scheme concerning divine rights overlap with classical Western discourse as a form of public duties upheld by the ruler, the Islamic scheme also clearly viewed the individual as a bearer of human rights.

~aym

This emphasis on human rights became only possible in Western thought after it had a paradigm shift away from the concept of divine rights of kings, while such a collapse of absolute monarchy and divine rights was unknown to Islam.

~aym

It can therefore be argued non-apologetically, as Ruud Peters emphasizes, that “Islam promotes or enjoins these positively valued concepts to the same extent or even more than ‘Western culture’ or Christianity and that it has done so for a much longer period” (Peters).

~aym

As we can see, based on Islam’s classical legal theory we can provide a very broad and well grounded human rights discourse, and there is still much to explore in this intellectual tradition. But we can state that human rights concepts clearly existed in premodern thought.

~aym

The study of premodern Islamic human rights discourse as a form of intellectual history is in its early infancy, shifting away from the modern positive law focus. And has immense potential for comparative philosophy of law, such as done by @jeroen_vlug: cchrr-journal.org/articles/abstr…

This thread focused on the existence of an internal human rights discourse in Islamic intellectual history, refuting both that human rights are a modern invention or that Islam has a human rights deficit. Our next thread will focus on Islam and modern human rights discourse.
~aym

@threadreaderapp unroll