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Contemporary Ideologies

Does Islam Need Saving? An Analysis of Human Rights | Nour Soubani | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention

April 19, 2018

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Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
Thank you all for being here. I know it's been a long day, so I'll try not to bore you. But I'm really happy to be here and to be able to share some of the research that I've been working on. So the title of my presentation is, Does Islam Need Saving? An Analysis of Modern Secular Human Rights. And the first thing I want to do is just talk about why this topic of human rights is even important for us to think about and why I chose to do this research. So the question of why human rights, and I think it's ironic in the same time frame right now at MASS, there's another talk I think on human rights violations in Bangladesh and then a talk on the secular and individual rights. So obviously this is a topic that is relevant to us and especially today we have human rights abuses and violations of human rights that are so widespread and have become so normalized that it's hard to keep track. So when we think about the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, all the way to Gaza and Palestine constantly under assault, the Syrian refugee crisis of the past few years, there are really just too many to name. And actually we don't need to go much further than our own borders in the U.S. and we should be careful not to always to think about what's happening internationally, but even domestically we can look to police brutality, inhumane detention, the prison industrial complex, all of these things that are violations on the dignity of human beings and on human life and human rights. And as onlookers we are constantly in this world of social and mass media consumption that makes us desensitized sometimes. So one year ago, Salil Shetty, who is the Secretary General of Amnesty International,
which is a human rights watchdog organization, reflected on the egregious human rights violations the world witnessed in 2016 and he wrote, but governments trying to find stability by curtailing long established human rights are going in the wrong direction. The solution to our problems is a stronger commitment to human rights, not a weaker one. So he touches on the weighty position that human rights hold in our society, which demonstrates the importance of understanding them and their history and how they have functioned in the past and in the present. Human rights are central to the work of NGOs, they inform many policy making decisions, and they're the foundation of many activist causes. Yet they seem to be slipping away from us. So is the problem that we have somehow as a society drifted away from this perfect vision of human rights and the sanctity of life? Or is there something more to the concept of human rights that we should understand in order to understand how they function? Or don't function? And then of course from an Islamic perspective, which I'm going to come back to in more detail later on, but we know that above all else in this world we are taught to value the sanctity of human life. So I want to start by framing the discussion and framing the research for you. So the topic of Islam and secular human rights can be understood in the context of the argument that Islam as a whole, as a religion, is antithetical to modern secular notions of human rights. So on one hand we have this Western idea of human rights as we know them today, and that's assumed to be agreed upon by the whole world. So as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
So human rights are assumed to be universal and self-evident, akin to nature, something innate, something that everybody, it's a given, everyone agrees upon it. And then on the other hand you have Islam, and there's been this framing of a conflict between Islam and universal human rights that raises the questions for Muslims and non-Muslims about Islam's compatibility with the idea of protecting the rights of the individual, such as the freedom of expression, the freedom of religion. And there are many, many examples where we've seen Islam has been framed as intolerant to these things and not caring about these freedoms of individuals. And these questions are closely tied to the issue of Islam's compatibility with modernity as a whole. So is Islam, I mean this is something I don't think I need to go into in much detail because we're constantly inundated with it in political, media, government discourse about this idea of Islam actually presenting an obstacle to Western values of freedom, democracy, liberty, and one of those values is human rights. So when we think of human rights today in the context of the international commitment to them, one thing that's often invoked is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and this was established in 1948 by the United Nations. But the idea of the rights-bearing individual did not actually begin with the Universal Declaration or with the United Nations, which are relatively recent developments. In other words, the concept of human rights or of the sanctity of life and the protection of human dignity and freedom has roots that are much more vast and widespread than is commonly known or acknowledged. And one example that we can look to is the role of non-Christian religions,
which have often been erased from a history or a narrative of human rights development. So the debate over the origins of human rights, whether they come from a Euro-Christian history of the world or from other non-Western religions or cultures or societies, this has led to many scholarly attempts to, in the case of Islam, to explain the compatibility or incompatibility of Islam with modern society. In the case of Islam, to explain the compatibility or incompatibility of Islam with modern secular universal human rights. And not just Islam, other religions and traditions as well. So on one side of that argument, you have scholars who say that the two are totally in sync, that Islam actually completely complies with universal secular notions of human rights, that some of the values in those doctrines have preceded the idea of human rights as we know them today, and actually that they came from Islam. Then on the other hand, you have scholars who say that the two systems are separate and there are some parts of those systems that cannot be reconciled. But this discussion about the origins or the foundations of human rights is not actually the one that I'm going to engage in. Instead, I'm going to be looking at universal human rights from a political perspective. And that means, how is it related to questions of power? And from this perspective, the questions that are going to come up, which I'm going to be trying to answer, are more like, who is human? What are rights? Whose rights matter? What do we mean by universal? And of course, where does Islam fit into this picture?
So to demonstrate some of these questions in action and sort of take them out of the abstract, I'm going to look at the example of the question, what are rights? So that might seem like a weird question because everybody knows there are certain rights that everybody has. It's not something that we often delve into. But if we look at the right to work, for example, the right to work is found in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in the 16th century, the concept of work was actually used to control people who posed a threat to the early modern state. So you have vagabonds, people who posed a threat. Work was actually used as forced labor to socially discipline these people. Then if we fast forward to the 18th century, work becomes a civil right and a national duty. And if we fast forward one more time to the 20th century, work is an instrument for stimulating the economy. So the right to work also at the same time, it's never actually in this country has never held much importance for the landowning class, the landowning elite, because they have a steady income in the form of land and they don't necessarily need to work. So in this way, we can understand that rights, while they're presented to us as givens, as inherent and as self-evident, each have a history that is tied to institutions and to power, which complicates their universality across time and space. So now we come to the related concept of the word human, who is human? And for this, we really need to look at the history of colonialism and the Christian missionizing project. And first, we can think about the concept of the savage that justified imperialist missions in much of the Muslim world and the world outside of Europe. So obviously, Christian moralists saw even these savages in the lands that they colonized, they still saw them as human,
because otherwise, what would be the purpose? What would be the point of even trying to convert them into Christianity? But seeing non-Christians as human because they were worthy of becoming Christian somewhere down the line, meant seeing difference as incompleteness. And this made the direction of progress based on a particular ideological path, which was Christianity. Later, when this whole project becomes a secular one, and we can argue that right now we are in a moment of empire that is perhaps more secular, these are the underlying ideas that inform how people are treated. So in the process of creating world empires, there were those who acted humanely and those who didn't. So not everybody was extremely cruel and inhumane, but in underlying both of these groups of different types of treatment was the agreement on subjugation. And that is that one group was better than the other. So mankind wasn't one because everybody was the same or held the same value, but because the differences represented different stages in the same process of progress. And here we just have a quote from the scholar Khalid Abu Al-Fadl connecting colonialism to Muslims and Islam and how human rights doctrine interacted with Muslims. So Muslims did not first encounter Western conceptions of human rights in the form of the UDHR of 1948 or in the form of negotiated international conventions. Rather, they encountered such conceptions as part of the white man's burden or the civilizing mission of the colonial era. And as part of the European natural law tradition, which was frequently exploited to justify imperialist policies in the Muslim world. So similarly, if we look at today, we can see how the same engine, the same moral theory has allowed for violence enacted on non-Western people.
So in this context, we can understand that when non-white people, Muslims included, are tortured, imprisoned, warred upon, this comes from the same sort of mixed fear and anxiety of the other as an enemy. At the same time, we still get that rhetoric about the need to spread Western values of freedom and progress to the other. So I mean, just a couple of examples, we can look at Guantanamo Bay, we can look at different, I mean just to bring it even closer to home, the Muslim ban which has been sort of come out in many iterations over the past year. This is the idea of an enemy, of an other that justifies the stripping of human rights and civil liberties. And at the same time, if we look at it from a different perspective, popular culture, I don't know if people know the show Homeland, there are many, many, many versions of similar shows and movies that dehumanize Muslims and justify this stripping of human rights. So when we talk about dealing with difference when it comes to rights, we also have to ask the question, who defines what rights are? Who gets to tell a group of people how to live their lives? And this is where the spectrum comes in from cultural relativism to universalism. On one end of the spectrum, we have cultural relativism. And this is a way of thinking about human rights that prioritizes the legitimacy of cultural norms and beliefs as the only source of authority on defining rights and their limits. Then on the other end of the spectrum, universalism contends that culture is extraneous to the question of rights afforded to people simply by virtue of their being human. And that universal notions of morality are what lend validity to the definition of rights.
So this leaves us with the obvious question, who gets to define what is moral, what morality is? Who has that authority? So Jack Donnelly, who's the scholar that defined the spectrum, he writes, radical universalism requires a rigid hierarchical ordering of multiple moral communities to which individuals and groups belong. The radical universalist must give absolute priority to the demands of the cosmopolitan moral community over all other lower communities. This denial of national and subnational ethical autonomy is dubious at best. So in this way, radical universalism, this framework of human rights, rejects the agency of communities to determine and follow their own conceptions of morality, of what it means to be human and of how humans should be treated. And this is obviously a problem because many of these societies and traditions and cultures, including Islam, have at their core these questions, these existential questions about what it means to be human and how they define morality. On the other hand, it's important to think about and critique the limitations of the cultural relativist argument as well, especially with regards to human rights abuses, because the danger here is that violations of the rights and freedoms of people can be justified by cultural or religious arguments. So I want to take this out of the theoretical and bring it to a real life example. Here we can look at the case of hijab or actually all the different types of covering of Muslim women. We're seeing this in many different cases in Europe, especially now.
There are always different arguments about policies banning hijab, this whole discussion. I think many of us probably lived or grew up in a post 9-11 U.S. context. One of the things that happened during the advent of the war on terror and U.S. military invasion into Iraq and Afghanistan was that Muslim women were actually pulled in and used as justification for this war to say that the U.S. is going into these places to save Muslim women because they're being oppressed by Muslim men. Hijab was used as one symbol of the oppression of Muslim women. We had people here in the U.S., feminists, academics, activists, fighting for the freedom and the liberation of Muslim women in the Muslim world. The scholar Leila Abu-Lughod wrote about this in 2007. She wrote the article, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? In it, she analyzes the intersection of the Western liberal feminist movement for women's rights and the war on terror in the early 2000s rhetoric. She says first that Muslim women were obviously used. They were othered and used as a justification for U.S. imperial expansion. More than that, she talks about the issue of culture. It relates to the spectrum of cultural relativism and universalism because in both cases, culture and how it relates to culture of Muslim women wearing hijab is understood as something rigid, something unchanging, something inherent and stagnant. What she says is that we should understand culture in a different way. She says, quote, the question is why knowing the culture of the region
and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women is more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history. Such cultural framing prevents the serious exploration of roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world. She critiques to the cultural relativist argument that culture is something that inherently goes against human rights instead of looking at a more socio-political, historical explanation for some of these abuses. Then on the other hand, though, she also critiques universalism. She writes, can we only free Afghani women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after liberation from the Taliban, they might want different things than we might want for them. Again, when I talk about accepting difference, I am not implying that we should resign ourselves to being cultural relativists who respect whatever goes on elsewhere as, quote, just their culture. I have already discussed the dangers of cultural expectations. Their cultures are just as much a part of history and an interconnected world as ours are. We may want justice for women, but can we accept that there might be different ideas about justice that different women might want or choose, different features from what we envision as best. We must consider that they might be called to personhood in different languages. Okay, so now we come to sort of what's become the elephant in the room. What does Islam say about human rights? Is there anything in Islam that gives rights to the individual? So I just want to put a note here. When it comes to specific rights or accusations against Islam
for certain things that we understand to be basic human rights and Islam's disregard for them, I really want to encourage you all, if you're interested, to look at some of the Yaqeen Institute's research by other fellows on these specific topics like minority religions under Islamic rule, like the rights of women, like apostasy, all of these things. Because I hope I've shown by now that there's really no such thing as universal when it comes to human rights. And so there's no such thing as universal across time and space. So when it comes to specific rights and understanding how Islam approaches each of these topics in a nuanced way, it's extremely important. But for now, what I do want to do is take a step back and talk about some of the broad concepts that we can use as a framework, an Islamic framework for human rights, how we understand human rights in Islam. So the first thing is the importance of people. This quote shows, it kind of talks about the reason that revelation was sent down in the first place was for people and how Allah says in the Quran, Each person, each son of Adam is given an inherent dignity and that dignity is not something that's connected to race, religion, ethnicity, culture, gender, any of these things. This is something truly inherent and God-given. Just by being human, you have this dignity. And the other point when it comes to the importance of people and the uplifting of people as just humans in Islam is the concept of compassion towards other people.
And it's actually funny, when I was doing research on human rights, compassion and sympathy and empathy, these are things that without them human rights would not, they wouldn't function. Because why would you care about anybody's rights if you don't see them as a person who's worth your compassion? And so in my research, I found that in the Western tradition, actually compassion was largely a construct. So there's all this research about how novels played a huge part in making people understand what the concept of the other is, why you should care about the person across from you, why what happens to them affects you, all of these things to teach people compassion. In Islam, that's something that we're taught and that's actually at the core of the religion. So the famous hadiths like the believer is the mirror of the believer, this idea that the person across from you is connected to you in a very deep and foundational way. Say again, the idea that people are connected and the other is actually a part of you and a reflection of you and you should care about what happens to them because it also ultimately affects you. And then another concept that's important to understanding a framework of human rights in Islam is justice. And I mean, there are many, many things you can look into to think about social justice in Islam, and Islam is a social justice tradition like Sheikh Omar's talks on the subject. But also Ibn al-Qayyim said that God sent his message and his people and his books to lead people with justice.
Therefore, if a just leadership is established through any means, then therein is the way of God. In fact, the purpose of God's way is the establishment of righteousness and justice. So any road that establishes what is right and just is the road that Muslims should follow. So this is really the elevation of justice as a core principle and above any kind of political authority and actually using justice to check political authority, whether that is Muslim authority or non-Muslim. And then when it comes to the topic of equality, we know that the Prophet, peace be upon him, in his last sermon said, All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab. Also a white has no superiority over a black, nor a black has any superiority over a white, except by piety and good action. And so this idea that really we're taught in Islam that all people are equal is really foundational for understanding human rights in Islam. So what's important to know beyond these kind of bigger concepts of human dignity and equality and justice, there is actually a very deep sort of discussion about rights in Islam. And from from an early point in Muslim tradition, Muslim scholars identified three categories of rights, the rights of God, the rights of people and dual rights. So the rights of God are the rights and duties that have a revealed imperative and a religious rationale. So they can both be mandatory obligations like ritual obligations or they can involve acts and things that benefit the entire community. So we can think about these things like observing the five pillars of Islam, providing services that result in the protection of the community from harm and the promotion of good.
These are all considered in the rights of God. The next category is the rights of persons, and these deal with the individual and social interests that address worldly concerns and affairs of people, including secular and civil issues like the right to health, to family, to safety, to property. And finally, the category of dual rights is the the overlap between these. So I'm not going to go into detail, but in the paper, what I do is talk about some of the very specific rights that are mentioned in Islam. And these are some of the examples, the right to life that we talked about, the right actually to the enjoyment of life, the right to shelter and food, the right to freedom of belief and to knowledge and many, many more. And I encourage you to look into those because what's important is further than just creating a framework and kind of a foundation for human rights in Islam. There are very specific commandments, if you will, about specific rights that people have and that it's the responsibility of people in power or privilege or that group to ensure those rights for other people. So what does all this mean? Why is it important? The question of whether Islam and modern secular universal human rights are compatible is important because if we want to address it, then we have to look at the rules of not just religion, which often this conversation becomes about just religion, but we also have to look at history, power and morality. And that intersection shed light on the problems with our current understanding of human rights and how they're protected.
Modern human rights are rife with contradictions and these contradictions very acutely are connected with the manipulation of Islam for political ends. So on the one hand, Islamic texts and history, like I've showed, shows a deep concern for the sanctity and enjoyment of life and for individual freedoms. And that's on every level, from respect for the individual at an interpersonal level to structural protection for people from corrupted authority, whether that's religious or otherwise. But on the other hand, Islam, as we know, is at the center of many agendas concerning resources, military expansion, security and culture. And this fact has been instrumental in creating a problem of Islam and human rights that has very little to do with the religion itself. So I'm going to stop there. Thank you all for listening. I'll take questions. I mean, I haven't looked into the Nobel Prize thing specifically, but it does sound like, I mean, this is the whole problem of human rights is one aspect of this discussion on whether Islam is as modern or as progressive or all of these things as the West, basically. And so the fact that Islamic contributions to peace, to science, to culture, all of these things has been completely erased is not an accident. That's very intentional. And so it does tie into this larger problem of the binary between the two. And yeah, it's related.
Yeah. Sorry. Are we OK? So the question was about the need for reform in Islam and this argument that Islam, like other religions before it, have gone through reform movements. It's time for Islam to go through its own reform movement. And I'm honestly, I'm not an expert on that. I'm going to open it up to Sheikh Omar or Imam Zaid if you would like to comment on it. My personal opinion, just from the research that I've done on this topic specifically, is that we have everything we need. And that we need to rethink how we're understanding what we've already been given and the values and the foundation that we have in the religion.
But in terms of reform movements and stuff, I don't know if anybody wants to weigh in. I'm just wondering if anybody wants to weigh in or not. Please. We allow ourselves to be abstracted from any comparative framework. And then we look at ourselves in isolation of abstraction. We're based on the framework that we're provided by the people oppressing us. So we're not terrorism all the time. Most of the time we're not terrorism. So we look at the whole scope of terrorism and abstraction. But we provide some comparative framework that uses language that's amenable to comparison. So a task that resolves civilian deaths. And so now we can compare Western, Israeli, American militaries with ISIS and al-Qaeda. And we see like we're exponentially less terroristic than those entities. So we can't be trapped by the language. The same with the Nobel Prize. We look at Muslims in abstraction. Muslims don't win Nobel Prizes in science. But we provide some comparative framework. So we use people in Latin America or people in South Asia.
And so now maybe it's not so much Muslims being backwards but it's a Western imperialistic paradigm that assesses who's worthy of the Nobel Prize. And so they all go to Western Europe. So now it's not a case of the backwards Muslim. It's a case of the racist Western. Western has a paradigm they've set up to assess who's backwards or not. How would you answer then to this question that's being put by Western media and media at a much smaller group of the time. How do you answer that? How do you answer those who think Islam is superior or Islam is more superior to the West? I ask them what does that mean because they don't define what that means. And so if it means just giving our position away so we can end up like them, then that's not something we want. Ultimately the answer is to help our own media to advance our own salvation through stories. I have a nice story. It was in a conservation. It was a village in India. And there was a young kid. He noticed every 18 months or so the tiger would gather villagers. And he would come and get up and a hunter would be hunting. And the tiger would be gathering the meat. And he would do that for a couple of years. But his father, when he told the story about the hunter and the tiger, the hunter always gets the tiger. So the child goes to his father and he says, Papa, I noticed that every so often the tiger eats the villager.
And he says, Papa, we don't hear about that. We only hear about the hunter getting the tiger. And his father said, when the tiger starts telling his version of the story, you'll get that. So we need to start off with a simple claim that journalism is not just individual hunters propagating their prejudice and how they bring their questions to the public. Thank you. Does anyone want to answer that? Yeah. There is actually a paper on that. I didn't do research on the Hadood, but there's a paper. I think it's in the journal. It's on page 78. Thank you. I know I think you're pointing to the contradiction between a lot of the language and then what we actually see on the ground.
Yeah. I know that the very first human right is the right to be free. And so it seems that it's a matter of being proactive and saying, well, we already have institutions in this country. Here's where we are. It's not going to be a political or something that needs to be reformed. And so I think it's a matter of saying, look, here is the right answer. We need to do better about presenting it instead of waiting for questions to come and trying to answer them from a general framework. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I don't I don't have an example. I think Muslim are you talking about like current Muslim governments or?
No, I think I think when we look for for kind of ideal or at least the research when I was doing research, when the kind of model would be when we go back to, you know, we can always look to the Prophet's time as a model and his his the way that he governed and that the Sahaba governed in Mecca and Medina as a model. When we look at current Muslim governments, I mean, I think that's a totally different story. And we to my knowledge, there's not one that kind of hasn't fallen into some type of problematic human rights issue. Yeah. I can say. Yeah. I think that's a really good question because and for this question I think I'll speak from personal experience. The work that I'm doing now is community organizing and advocacy around actually a lot of human rights issues.
And in that space, I think sometimes sometimes you're right. It's it's uncomfortable to bring not just Islam, but religion in general is not is not welcome in that space. And I think what was helpful for me about doing this research in this paper is that we take some of these, quote, secular ideas as a given sometimes and a given that they're kind of like the basic moral way that the world should work. And then when we deconstruct them, we see that they're actually filled with so many contradictions, so many problems that that it is helpful to look elsewhere. And for us, that may be religion and it may be a stem. And so I think one step that we can take in what I tried to do with this paper is deconstruct some of these assumptions that that were given. Because that ultimately, for me at least, led to a greater appreciation of what Islam can contribute to the field of human rights and us trying like as activists trying to to work towards more like dignity and protection for the rights of people.
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