Dogma Disrupted
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Human Rights and Wrongs | Episode 3
Human rights may seem like an obvious thing to advocate for. After all, we are all human and want the best for ourselves and others. But where does our notion of rights really come from? Who is the “human” of human rights?
Imam Tom Facchine invites Dr. Zara Khan to discuss the history of human rights movements, the underlying assumptions of what it means to be human, as well as how human rights discourse is politicized and weaponized against Islam and Muslims.
Chapters
0:00 - Introduction
2:00 - Defining “rights” and their origins
5:05 - The rights of Allah
6:15 - Rights implied in the Qur'an
8:56 - Two sources of rights from Surah al-Nisa
12:07 - Origins of the Western conception of rights
14:28 - Roman-Christian tradition vs. Enlightenment
21:03 - Imam Ghazali on the sacred value of society
22:30 - The (not) Universal Declaration of Human Rights
24:32 - Are human rights useful?
25:50 - Defining the “human” in “human rights”
28:55 - Unpacking freedom of religion
31:00 - Not all societies prioritize the same rights
33:00 - The state defines and limits human rights
35:25 - Secularism in the United States and France
37:57 - Consent to marriage, child labor
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Two women in Afghanistan and one of them is making, is calling, again full circle, calling to their rights to be honoured by the first verse of surah Nisa, right? Appealing to their rights through Allah and for the arham, right? The natural sort of kinship rights. And you have woman number two who is appealing to human rights discourse, to gender autonomy, to moral autonomy individualism. Universal human rights is not neutral as to which one of those two women is more human, right? And that's a scary thing. And actually it will fund education, you know, and it will actually even drop bombs sometimes in order to sort of favour one over the other or to produce one and to sort of marginalise the other. Yes, Ulf is right. As-salamu alaykum, welcome back to Dogma Disrupted where we look at modern ideologies in light of the Islamic worldview. And we are very, very pleased to have with us as a guest today Dr. Zahra Khan to talk about human rights. Dr. Zahra Khan is a specialist in this field. Her doctoral dissertation is called Refractions Through the Secular Islam, Human Rights and Universality which questions the universality claims of human rights. Now this is going to be extremely significant for us. We have future episodes lined up that are going to be about women's rights, feminism and then LGBTQ rights. And I think it's fair to say and Dr. Zahra you can correct me that almost all rights claims currently are either built upon or indebted to in some sort of way, the idea of human rights. So the discussion that we have today is going to be really, really essential to unpacking other things down the line that are affected by human rights discourse. So the first sort of thing I guess
to start off Dr. Zahra, what are rights and where do they come from? As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. I'm really happy to be here. Alhamdulillah. What are rights and where do they come from? It really depends on who you ask. So if we're talking about universal human rights as a discourse and a practice in our postmodern time, that's one way of talking about it. What are the theory, the norms and the history, right? The history of where this discourse comes from. And then if we talk about, you know, as Muslims, what are some of the basic foundational concepts that underlie our understanding of what rights are, rights and duties, that would be another way of answering the question. So let's do, because, you know, dogma disrupted, we're trying to find, you know, as far as I understand, what parts of human rights can we appropriate as Muslims fruitfully and beneficially for ourselves, our communities, as well as human beings at large, and which parts are harmful to the full practice of our faith, and to society and to the global civilization. So in order to kind of separate the harmful from the beneficial, I think it'd be important to look at both conceptions side by side. So we can start, you know, with Surat al-Nisa, Allah says in the opening ayah of this Nisa, you know, Oh, you humankind, revere your Lord who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate, its pair and then disseminated from it, all men and women. And Allah says, you know, continuing in this ayah, that revere Allah by whom you ask one another, right? And whose name you demand your rights from one another, and revere the blood ties and truth is all watchful over you and Allah haqqana alaykum raqiba. So this is the foundation of where we understand rights, it is in the name of Allah that we demand our rights over one another. Because Allah being the source of
all life, being the source of you and I, being the source of society and different human nations created one another on this transitory life of this dunya, Allah is the locus of our mutual rights, right? And then from here, you know, just recalling that Allah's, one of Allah's beautiful names is al-haqq. In this name, we have, you know, the truth, the barometer of what is true and false, the haqq and the batil, rooted in this one of Allah's beautiful names. And at the same moment, rights, haqq is the right. The haqq or the rights. And, you know, in the Islamic tradition, and I'm not an expert in this area, but I know that the interpretation by the fuqaha, the interpretation by philosophers like Ibn Tufayl in his work, Hayy Ibn Yaksan, which is a very different state of nature picture than we get from Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau, we see that this concept of rights as rooted in the creator of all things has had an interpretive history. And in the, from the very first century of Islam, through the ninth century of Islam, with Shahab al-Din al-Karafi being kind of the, one of the big proponents of this, we have the idea that Allah has rights, the huquq Allah and the huquq ibad. And this was a juristic device that was developed in order to balance, you know, the private interests of individuals and then the public good, right? What's good in society? How do you build the moral fabric of society? And I think it's important to point out for our discussion today, that this is an additional framework that the jurists developed, right? They have their fiqh, they have the interpretation of their principles based on methodology that's established to interpret sacred texts into positive rulings for society, to adjudicate our social relations and to lay down principles governing ibadat, but an additional language was needed on the
ground, so to speak, so that the public could understand and embody the fiqh that was being generated. And so this huquq Allah and huquq ibad gets developed in order to, to let that be translated to the bigger society. And I think another way, if I could just insert real briefly, I think, you know, a lot of people misunderstand the works of the scholars in sort of like a very stark binary of, well, this is revelation and then this is not. Well, there's also things that are implied in the revelation that need to be spelled out by the ulama, right? So I think what you're talking about here, the huquq Allah and the huquq ibad is something that is implied, right? Within the sharia and in the Quran. And therefore, when the scholars sort of started talking about it, it's not that they're inventing something new, right? It's something it's they're clarifying something, or they're making perhaps explicit, something that was implicit, right? Or they're sort of organizing or categorizing things that maybe were disparate and dispersed. Would you say that that's, that's fair? JazakAllah khair. Imam Tan, absolutely. When Ali radiallahu anhu was accused of not ruling by the Quran, you know, he responded, it's a book between two covers, it doesn't speak. Obviously, you know, not implying that Allah is not speaking to all of humanity through the eternal word, the Quran, but implying exactly as you just elucidated for us that it is the job of the human beings and the people of knowledge in any time and space, knowledge of law as well as a fact, right? A fact to come together and renew the understanding of the meaning in every new history, context, and to kind of employ the the language of the time and language, you know, language is not just grammar and vocabulary and syntax. Language is values and action. And the language of any people will show you upon study, what
is valued, how it's valued, and in relation to all the other values, and the language of our time, to, to, to speak the principles of Islam, in a way that will be coherent to the people, right, including ourselves, because we are also of our time and our place. And, and the message is universal. And so there's always this dialectic, as you were just explaining, and these jurists with this, with this kind of classical Islamic scheme of hukookah lillah and hukookah libad, they use naturalistic reasoning, right, because we're talking about human rights in our 2023 context, it's based on natural rights, and this paradigm and natural rights. And so these scholars also use naturalistic reasoning to make this additional framework. And, and so let's continue with the with, I mean, if you if you if you want to kind of switch over now to what how the right schemes have developed in the, in the West, we have a, if I could just add to your to your argument, they're actually the area that you mentioned, and I wasn't even thinking about that. I'm really glad that you started with the first I have swords and he sat, because there's actually two locations or sources from which Allah points to us deriving our rights. He says, he says from him, right, which you identify, but he also has, he also says, well, our ham, right, which is a really, really interesting addition in the eye that basically, you appeal, what do you appeal to in order to claim your rights? That's kind of like the question behind the eye. And the first thing is you appeal to Allah. Okay, I was like, so you understand from Allah his reality, the content, what we know who he is, you use that to appeal to each other to get your rights. And also a ham, right, your sort of your, your kinship bonds or your,
your relationality or something like, well, we could argue about how to translate it. But I find that very interesting that it's not necessarily the exclusive, maybe the relationship between the two, one is derivative from the other, we could say that the rights that we appeal to each other through our kinship ties is derivative from the ultimate reality of Allah. But it does show that there is sort of this second domain there that I think a lot of people would probably locate in some sort of natural rights framework that has to do with, there's an implied understanding that because we're family, or we have some sort of kinship, that that would entail some sort of right. So I just found that really interesting. And I never thought about it in that way before. So I thought it helped your your argument before you get into sort of where maybe I'm guessing we're going to the enlightenment and where sort of the human rights discourse sort of developed from there within the Western European tradition. So yeah, back to you. Yeah, no, Mashallah. You know, Allah's name Ar-Rahman and then the womb of the mother is derived from the same as Allah's most beautiful name Ar-Rahman. And not only to indicate the mercy that all mothers have for their children. And of course, this is, this can be renewed and its relevance, specifically to historical questions of it, you know, is abortion going to be the next human right? Understood, right, socially understood, right, where, where the right of the locus of mercy for human society, the mother has the quote, unquote, right to terminate a child, you know, without without cause, you know, without a medical, you know. So I'm really glad that you brought that up. And there, you know, the book of Allah is the Quran and his eternal word. And then there's the book of creation, which is also full of ayat. And right in the third of the proofs in the Quran seem to come from this book of nature. And, and certainly
the mother's womb as the as the focal point of our social of our kinship ties, right, which then extends into extended networks and social ties is certainly among the sacred signs of Allah. So I'm very thankful you brought that up. And we see the difference with the with the Western conception of rights, and even in the Western conception of rights, and I'll outline a few of the major key moments, right, the key highlights and the development of this concept, but it's also not a single story in the West. There's also been, for example, the, you know, from Plato, and the classical Greek thinking and the early Christian theologians, right, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, there was one way of thinking about rights that was perhaps closer to the Islamic understanding of Allah being central and important. And, you know, really the location of our rights over one another, versus what happens with the movement away from that in the West, right. So there, there are multiple trajectories, even in the West. So one largely over the other, but nonetheless, is part of the legacy of that Western rights tradition. So you have the scholar out in UCLA, Anthony Pagden, and he points out that with, you know, going back to ancient Greece, antiquity, which Western civilization claims as its ancestor, as its rightful ancestor, even though there's a whole lot of historical issue, it's very anachronistic to do that, you know, more of a narrative building than simple historical reality, right? Yes, 100%. That ancient world, that Mediterranean universe, didn't belong more to, you know, what would later become known as Europa than it did to what would later become, you know, Nubia and Egypt and Sudan, you know, like, it was its own thing. And later, Europe, and there's a
book, The Myth of Hellenic Ancestry, that kind of why this was done, how it was done. But anyway, the Western civilization and philosophical domain says, okay, ancient Greece, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, this is our birth home. And Pagden points out that these great thinkers that they never expressed right, you know, the hook as something distinct from justice, this was actually part of their framework. And so, if you think about Socrates's concept of justice, it's like our concept of adab, right? Adab occurs when everything is in its proper place, in relation to everything else. And that was his definition of justice, right? Everything being in its proper place. There wasn't this idea of kind of standalone, independent atomic rights that individuals have in a vacuum. When you continue from ancient Greece to ancient Rome, you have this idea of the use, right? IUS, still a word that's very much used in law and international law, and in legal theory. And the use also was not natural or universal, but it was constituted in the society, like you were just mentioning about the ties around the womb, right? The ties of kinship, it's constituted by the social relation. It's not something that what Talal Asad calls, like it's a free-floating signifier, right? It's rooted in the social fabric and the social network. And then with the Roman emperor Justinian in the 6th century, he introduces a change, where he creates what we call, not creates, I'm sorry, he articulates and codifies what we now know as natural law. And natural law is considered to be free from law, and not necessarily, you know, affected by the historical and the particular social realities.
The Christian theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, a couple of centuries later, he Christianizes Justinian's natural law. And, you know, Thomas Aquinas was famous for his hierarchy of laws. And so you can see that for a Christian theologian to incorporate an appropriate natural law, he did it in a way that made it consistent with the Christian theology, right? Which is that the divine law is supreme, it's a hierarchy. And then it is the natural law, which is kind of like the ayats of Allah, as you can observe in nature. And then beneath that is the law of man, right? Positive law. And in order to be just, our law has to be consistent with the two that come above us. When you enter now, as you mentioned, that I was going to speak about the Enlightenment, when you enter into the age of modernity, with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, here, you've got the radical departure, right from the previous Christian and classical Greek way of understanding what rights are. And with John Locke, and Hobbes, they paint a very strange picture of what the human being supposedly is before we enter into civilized society, right? Very dark picture. State of war, right? Sort of every man for themselves, everybody's sort of locked in existential struggle against the other. Yeah, no security, no high culture, certainly. And so rights here takes on a very superficial, a very shallow, it's just the security of person and possession, basically, which is modern liberal nation state is built upon this idea that your most fundamental right is to be safe in your person and your property. That's a kind of loftier signifier attached to what the basis of society is. And here you've got Hugo Grotius, you know, who actually influenced John Locke, and who himself was
influenced by Cheybani and his famous treatise Asiyar, where the first kind of international law treatise was actually written by a Muslim, who then influenced Hugo Grotius to write his Freedom of the Seas. But Grotius also puts down this very thin vision of what constitutes right, and here you've got the rise of this freestanding individual. In the West, when you look at these political philosophies that come up in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, laying the groundwork for the Enlightenment, you see that the individual is the most important unit in all society, and in all life and thought. And the individual whose origins are obscure, right? Some of these thinkers said that, you know, men and women randomly meet in nature, and they, you know, a baby comes out of that, the man is gone, the woman raises a child for a few years, and then she too is gone. It's a vision of where we come from. Like, what is the story in the life of this world? And yes, it's metaphorical, but it's very important and impactful on subsequent, you know, understandings of, well, who are we, why are we here, and what rights do we have over one another? Yeah, I mean, when you first mentioned that to me, I first go to, it's almost an evolutionary sort of scheme, right? You've got, and this is maybe, maybe it would take us too far afield, but if we're looking for a common thread, right, between, let's say, the Greek tradition and the Islamic tradition and even the Christian tradition, the pre-modern sort of way of thinking through rights without, you know, homogenizing and saying there's no differences, of course there probably are, but I think that what you're telling us is that the idea of the human being is one that's very situated, right, one that's very enmeshed in a divine relationship, and that divine relationship both gives identity to the human being, it gives purpose to the human being, and it also, you know,
downstream of that, influences what even makes sense to talk about as rights, whereas the big departure from what you're telling us is that, you know, the enlightenment kind of decontextualizes the human being and takes them out of that necessary divine relationship, and it's really, the other thing that occurred to me while you were talking is Marlow's, or Maslow's, sorry, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, like we say that, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the first thing is food and security, and that's at the bottom, that's basic, and that's something that's so, it has proliferated so much in even popular culture, I hear Muslims talking about it all the time, but it's actually a particular anthropology, right, that's being assumed there, and what we mean by that is a particular definition of the human being where the relationship with the divine is kind of something extra or excess or not essential, that it can be added, it can be subtracted, it can be there or not there, what's real, capital R real, is the material, the food, the calories, the safety, and that's a significant, significant departure, so fascinating, thank you, yeah, do go on. Yes, Barakallahu fiqh, Imam Tom, and I'm familiar with some of your work, so I know you're kind of looking at the roots and the foundations of some of the modern beliefs and ideologies, and that's very important. I kind of get at those roots, and so you're absolutely right to point that out, you know, men like Hobbes and Locke and Grotius, they specifically articulated that religion can't be the foundation of human laws, right, this is their, in their own words, I'm not extrapolating, whereas for Muslims, you know, the sanctity of the public space is one of the hukukullah, right, and if you look at Imam al-Ghazali, rahimallah, his work on kind of the essential
arts that all human societies have always produced, you know, what a civilization and what is it made of, society has a sacred value, and it's not just because of our mutual needs, but he also kind of goes up the hierarchy, you know, that we farm and we have crafts and shelter and textiles to clothe ourselves, and then eventually politics is the art of happiness in this world and the next, so the purpose of political society and the reason why you work towards it, you know, through thinking and through action is in order to create the conditions that will allow the most number of people to be happy in this life, our material needs being met, and the moral fabric of society being intact, and in the next life, right, because that would also be, you know, among the good deeds that inshallah we can carry with us, and so that's a very different vision than what political society is understood at, coming out of this natural rights and, you know, French Revolution, Enlightenment, American Revolution, all the way up to the 20th century, by the time you get to the 20th century, and you get to the First World War, Second World War, in western civilization, after World War II, there is a need for a consensus, right, among the countries that have exited the patriotic war, and that there's a conservative and a Christian democratic hegemony, and land on this new type of national welfarism, because at the end of World War II, and, you know, you've got the United States and the Soviet Union are locked in the Cold War, which is this humanitarian struggle for what is going to be the reigning ideology after this battle is lost and won, and the countries of Western Europe, they arrive at national welfarism, the nation state has won uncontested as the political form, nationalism has won as the uncontested ideology that's going to carry forward, and so what's missing is now like the
internationalism, right, and you'll notice that the outside the West, the non-West, you know, all the subaltern countries, the colonized countries, they're not really too interested in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it is very specific, it's speaking from a certain group of people in Western Europe, yes, they've got signatories from other countries, you know, they brought in the Lebanese Christian, and they brought in some South Americans, but really those were political elites who didn't necessarily represent the best interest of most of the world at the time, so most of the non-West in the 1940s, when the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is being articulated, prefer things like the Atlantic Charter, the Bandung Conference, they're focusing on things like self-determination, because that's their reality, and that's a small group of political elites in one part of the world, you know, the part that has come down this historical trajectory of Western civilization, enlightenment thought, French Revolution, and they've got a specific vision of what it means to be human, and what the rights of these humans are, and vis-a-vis whom. Human rights are just like the moral law of the state, right, it's rights that you and I can hold against our countries, that's it, it's not anything more profound than that, you know, all that being said, it's not something to just throw away, I think it's something to consider critically and understand historically, there's a lot of currency in the language of human rights today, it has a legitimacy, and we can use human rights in our verbiage, if we use it intelligently, to make claims, right, and seek protections for people, but to do it in a way that we understand that this is not universal per se, there's a lot of challenges to the universal mission of human rights from societies all over the world that say, well, this is not us.
Yeah, no, those are, that's a lot to unpack, and we, I do definitely want to get around to thinking about how, first of all, the justification for appropriation, because that's something that there's not a consensus about, sort of some interesting conversations that have, that have, that inform that, and then how that could be done, but before that, let's talk about that human being. So first of all, well there's two things I really want to talk about first, just to fully flesh it out for the listener. First is, what is that definition of human that's in the quote-unquote universal human rights, and how is it different from what Islam says, or what does it leave out? Okay, you know, we've talked a little bit about the divine embodiment and these sorts of things, and then secondly, what are the implications of sort of this one particular sensibility of what the human being is, and therefore the rights that derive from it? What's the political sort of implication of the political elites, mostly based in Western Europe, taking it as universal, and going and saying that, well, this has to be the standard by which the entire world has to judge who is basically doing the right or doing the wrong, they're doing good or they're doing bad, and maybe foreign aid is tied to it, and maybe you get invaded if you don't, right? So I want to tease out those implications too, but first let's just to sit just for another moment, what is being left out in the idea of what is human in the human rights frame that Islam says, hey, wait a second, that's got to be back in there. Yeah, so I think that's one of the right questions, who is the human of human rights, right? And this is where we find some of the issues and problems with fully appropriating this discourse, because we can't sign on to some of these implications. So
the interesting thing is that in human rights language, who is the human being is a negative space, it's not answered, and this is deliberately, it's an agnosticism translated into a political theory, right? And this is done on purpose, and you've got all the kind of big theorists of universal human rights, Jack Donnelly, James Nicoll, Alan Geaworth, all this kind of literature and corpus of theorizing says, you know what, this is exactly what is needed, we need to be able to come up with a human rights framework that does not subscribe to any particular philosophical anthropology, which is big for theory of the human being, and they devote pages to affirming that this is why human rights can work for everybody. As we don't espouse any specific philosophical belief about the human being, any person from any society following any religion and having any historical background can sign up and sign on, right, and basically get down with human rights. And here is where a lot of challenges are brought, because just to have this absence in identifying the human of human rights doesn't make it go away. There is an actual set of implications about who the human being is. In my own kind of work, and I'm not a specialist of human rights in the broader sense, but one of the areas that I looked at was the freedom of religion norm, and you know, this is a norm that gives people living in different states, any country that's a signatory to human rights treaties can evoke these rights against their state, right, the freedom to practice a religion of their choosing, to assemble with others and congregate and have acts of
worship and holidays and ritual practices. So it's very important, and it sounds good, and I myself, I've met Muslims from, let's say, Dagestan who don't enjoy those privileges, right, so as an American who's always critical, sorry, I'm not sure if you can still see, okay, is my camera still good? Okay, okay, as you know, someone who's kind of always critical of liberal states and American politics, when I meet Muslims from Dagestan who can't even, the men can't wear beards, the women can't cover themselves in specific ways because it's illegal in their country, it helps me to appreciate some of the religious freedom in the United States, right, I don't have those problems, my husband doesn't have those problems, but who the human is in the freedom of religion norm, it's basically the idea that religion is something that is not embodied, but exists in a very disembodied level of the consciousness only, so religion has nothing to do with economics and politics and social fabric, religion is just me in my conscious mind, my beliefs, you know, don't tell me what to think, don't tell me what to believe, it's the morally autonomous human being, not even a human being who should rightfully go and advise other people, you know, not, we're not talking about forcing other people into religious belief, we, you know, we use that as Muslims, but not even to advise others, right, that would kind of break the norm of a liberal vision human being, so again, as you were mentioning, you know, cut off from social ties and some of the challenges, when we look at the challenges that have been brought against universal human rights in the last couple of decades, the big one is kind of the Asian values challenge and this was 1993, 1995, you have the Bangkok conference, you have almost 40 countries from Asia and the Pacific region
who signed this document and they find, they find it hard to appropriate universal human rights because they focus too much on civil and political rights and not economic and social rights and from an Asian values perspective, really, for a person to have an economic safety net in society is much more important than whether or not they're voting in midterm elections or not, right, it just didn't make sense for certain societies, their priority. From my understanding, countries like the United States who, you know, may be fearing something like communism or socialism have continuously vetoed or voted against or lobbied against the inclusion of those types of economic rights in more universal sort of human rights documents, right, so just to flesh things out for the listener, like, so for example, maternity leave, right, to the idea that maternity leave would be a human right that you, or even let's be more radical and let's say a woman's right to not have to work, right, which is something that Islam espouses, could that be a human right, right? If it were at the floor of the UN, the US would definitely throw its veto around and say, no way, we need that body working, producing wages that we can tax and, you know, etc, etc. So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about what gets included as a right depends on our definition of who's, of what's, who's a human in the first place, and what are, what's entitled to that human being. And there's one really interesting thing that, that, SubhanAllah, when you were talking, it reminded me of, it's almost like there's this catch-22, because, and you know, you and I are both indebted heavily to Assad, and Assad points this out, is that in order, you're appealing to the state to get your human right, or you're trying to claim your right from the state, however, you depend on the state to define and to execute and to guarantee
that right. And so that's a whole other can of worms to explore how that happens, because, you know, for example, religious freedom is a really, really sensitive thing, and I'm sure maybe this is where you were intending on going, but written into the language of the right, the universal right to religious freedom, there's that important except, right, that but clause, where it's like, except for what the state deems whatever the language is, national security, I can't remember you know better than I do, but it gives that escape hatch, because we depend upon, at least in the way that the modern sort of world is situated or configured, we depend upon the modern nation-state to execute and guarantee those supposed human rights for us, the nation-state actually gets to decide what those rights look like, whether it looks like the religious freedom of France, or the religious freedom of Dagestan, or the religious freedom of the United States of America. I'd really like your comment on that. And then, but just so that I don't forget, a lot of people, you know, your comparison of, you know, the freedoms that we have, you know, to exercise our religious freedom in the United States, very, very, a great thing that both you and I rely heavily upon, right, and we are humbled when we meet people from other parts of the world that don't have those same freedoms. These things are often rubbed in our faces, right, by saying it's like, oh, you're so critical of the United States, you're so critical of the West, and yet here you are, breathing our air freely and doing this sort of thing. Is it attributable? What do we attribute that freedom to? Is it the state? Is it a culture, right? Because, you know, there is also a negotiation, there's a very different tradition of religious religiosity and religious freedom in the United States than there is in France. I know I'm opening up a lot of threads, but if you could talk to both those things.
Jazakallah khair. Yeah, and, you know, all these threads are interconnected, so it's, you know, they kind of mutually lead into one another, but it's, so it's both. It's the particular character of the state, you know, the United States is a welfare state, and that is a particular interpretation among the liberal democracies that are industrialized in the world of what the responsibility of the government is towards vulnerable people that live there. With respect to the interpretation of the relationship between state and religion, you're absolutely correct to point out somewhere like France, right, there is a tradition. I know that we think about, in the modern world, we think about tradition in a very, in a very negative way, right? Not as Muslims, we have Islamic tradition, and we kind of understand that the past is always present, and we draw from the wellsprings of the past, right? But if you think about politically, tradition is understood as, can be understood as like antiquated and no longer relevant. But we have traditions of secularism differently in different countries. In the United States, we have a certain pluralism that developed as a result of migration patterns, and the way that the government, which was the government of elite landowners, was made up of people who had, for different political reasons, they had cause to allow for religious pluralism for the economic prosperity of the nation. And it took kind of, you know, John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic president. I think after that, everyone calmed down about the last bit of anxiety about pluralism. But in France, where you have the laicite kind of tradition, Olivier Roy, I think, points this out in his work, where he compares the different secular models in different countries.
Secularism confronts Islam in a very different way, as we've seen from a lot of the contentions, violence against Muslims in France, and banning the Muslim swimming dress at the beach, at the public beaches. It's a very hostile attitude towards religion in general, which in the United States, you don't have that tradition. Nowadays, you have an increasingly secular culture and post-modernity, and there's only one way to be a good Muslim, and that's if you don't really care about Islam in any way. You don't interpret your works in the world to be part of Ibadat. That's a good way to be a Muslim, increasingly in an increasingly secular culture. But in France, it's much more hostile from the very beginning. So their interpretation is going to vary. So you're definitely right to point that out. And among all these challenges to human rights, what you see is that communities across the world are, and I'm going to return in a minute to your point about the rule of the law and how that's a paradox for the human rights model. But even in India, you have kind of critiques coming to universal human rights that says, you know, there's an emphasis on the nuclear family, but that's not how we operate. There's a family in India, in much of traditional India and Bangladesh, and parts of Southeast Asia that are not extended family kin networks. And that is the only way that social and political and economic rights will make any sense. And then if you look at like marriage laws, right, like the idea of consent, it's very differently interpreted. We know what we believe in terms of like consent is necessary for marriage and kind of what are the ways that that plays out and who is the woolly and what role does the woolly play in the contract, legal contract of a marriage. But in a place like India, where Muslims are a very large minority,
that's not necessarily the case. They have their own understanding of how marriage kind of interacts with these extended kin networks. Child labor has been another contention and contest that has been brought against universal human rights. People younger than 18 in many parts of the world absolutely must work for villages and societies and families to survive and thrive. And it's part of how knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. I don't mean to say that we overlook and excuse gross violations of human rights with respect to child. That's not what I'm implying at all. But rather that that this is not a universal one size fits all cookie cutter. Who is the human, what are the rights of the human? And how can this be imposed upon different societies? Now, you mentioned also that there's this catch 22 and this paradox. And I know Imam Tam that you're very, very well versed in the work of Wael Halak. And he is the one who really kind of doubles down on this idea that the modern state has its own metaphysic, right? It exists only for its own sake. It can command us not only to kill for it, but to die for it, right? When you think about sending people off in fighting wars. And the state is really the actor in human rights. The human is the supporting actor. And it's when they sign up, they sign their names on these treaties, and they affirm a document that they say, we promise to protect these rights. Now, human rights does not have an enforceable mechanism, right? The United Nations has peacekeepers, not an army, which is probably a good thing, because human rights can turn into politics by other means, right? And we can- I'll talk about that in a sec. That was going to be
my next question. Yeah. I'll segue to that for sure. But, you know, there's no enforceable mechanism. And instead, what you have is the promise that states will uphold. Now, states have shown themselves, look, coming back to freedom of religion for just another minute here, that they will enforce it differently. So you've got a number of cases in Europe, where, you know, individuals can take their grievances against their states who are not upholding their human rights. They can take them to the International Court of Justice, to the European Court. And they can say, my government has violated this law, you know, this human rights law that it signed its name on. And you have instances where Christian symbols, like wearing the crucifix in a school, have been allowed, and wearing the hijab has been forbidden. And these are, you know, in Italy, in Turkey, in Switzerland, you have a number of case law that was brought to the international court in Europe. And the court says, and this is what you were mentioning earlier, that the state has discretionary power, right? And it can make exceptions to these norms, freedom of religion norm, other types of norms, based on safety and security and the moral, the moral good, the public good. That is extremely loose, open for interpretation. It basically, and that's, I guess, where I'm going, at least, looking at how do states weaponize human rights discourse against their own populations, and against populations abroad? Because, yeah, I mean, we have, especially post 9-11, war on terror, like these sorts of things. I mean, it's basically become the grammar by which people justify their various sort of political machinations. But I'll leave that to you.
So this is exactly what is meant by human rights as politics by other means. You know, people say war is politics by other means, and that is certainly true. But what it means to say that human rights is politics by another name is to say that the powerful impose their will, and impose their influence, and coerce other people through the language, through the legitimating language of human rights. Again, not a reason to throw human rights out the window altogether. But we have to be aware of how and when this occurs. So a couple of examples. I think the most glaring example would be the quote, unquote, humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan, right after September 11th, was articulated almost entirely, other than, you know, they hate our freedom and kind of nonsense like that. But it was articulated entirely for the benefit of the women of Afghanistan, who for 30 years before September 11th, had organized themselves to try to kind of, you know, live dignified lives with respect to some of the excesses of the Taliban regime. And there was really no care or consideration for their issues and how they were identifying what was most bothersome to them. It may or may not have been the burqa, right? It may have had more to do with literacy, access to healthcare, freedom from poverty, freedom from, you know, lack of access to drinking water and things of that nature. But Laura Bush, you know, comes out and basically uses the women of Afghanistan, her sisters from across the ocean, as the reason why her husband is going to launch this despicable campaign in Afghanistan and destroy a country that was already on the brink of humanitarian disaster. So that's one way in which human rights verbiage... And I must point out, with the particular example of Afghanistan,
by the way, if anybody's interested, there's a great article by, co-written by Sabab Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind about the justifications for the invasion and the bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of 9-11, and particularly the complicity of the feminist movement with this particular military operation, which I have to point out here because there's sort of a very crude take, right, that if, you know, let's say that if feminists ran the world or... And this will be a whole other episode that will get into feminism and sort of gender and those related issues. But there is an argument within feminist circles that, you know, if feminists were in power and if feminism were taken seriously in a structural way, that the world would see less war, etc., etc., there would be more justice, there would be less sort of egregious violations of human rights and whatnot. And yet we saw, and it wasn't the first time and it wasn't the last time, that feminists were on the front lines when it came to justifying the invasion and the aerial bombardment of Afghanistan with using the language of human rights, using the language of women's rights as that sort of, as you said, legitimizing discourses, like providing the justification for the violence on other people's bodies, lives, and entire worlds. So that's something we have to take extremely, extremely seriously, like when this stuff falls into the wrong hands. Were there any sort of other comments either on that situation or other examples that you had called to mind? Yeah, and I mean, it's great that you're pointing this out because that legitimation, that discourse, right, and the public opinion that's formed by, you know, now by influencers,
maybe not so much in 2001, but that kind of community and consensus around these issues and the way that they're portrayed becomes a very important factor in the legitimation and the currency of the discourse itself. So those women and those feminists who, I would say that they were guilty of an uncritical thought process, not necessarily a malice like the neoliberal kind of neocon. They looked at Afghanistan, what they saw was the pipeline to the Caspian Sea that was going to let billions of barrels of crude oil get pumped out of there every day with low cost to them. Those women who said, you know, we have to do something for our sisters in Afghanistan, let's just say their heart was in the right place. But they, but you're right, there was this complicity, right? And you did have some outlying voices like, you know, Zilla Eisenstein and others who were like, no, war is bad. And it's going to be, it's going to make their lives worse. And neoliberal world order, and we can't be duped. But certainly, even with torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the same kind of, and you know, liberal political actors are not, are also not one single group with groupthink. They also diverge sometimes. So you did have many people who thought that it was when some of the worst excesses came to light, of course, everybody was kind of shocked and ashamed. But you did have many kind of justifications that said, you know, in the name of national security, and, and there's this long and sordid history. And Joseph Massad shows this in his work, Islam and liberalism, where this concept of women's rights as humans, right, as human rights, it really becomes very popular and really kind of blows up in the 1970s, and the 80s. And it starts to pose all kinds of woman questioning, like women
questions, in exclusively Western ways, and, and imposes upon women in other parts of the world, the same issues that let's say, women in the West experience and says this priority, these are their priority issues. And, you know, people like gender Mahanti have pointed out that this is pretty much an imperial project, doing this, but Western hegemony kind of in those situations. And when you look at conferences, like Vienna in 1993, Cairo, 94, Beijing, 95, these international women conferences in the 90s, really became a popular vehicle for expressing some of these ideas. It was just a way of posing the woman in Western ways, and then providing in some way, a legitimation for military humanitarianism, which is what the campaigns in Afghanistan were. They were called humanitarian, but it was a military campaign, and it was just militarism, capacity building, and empowerment and civil society that these become like code words for spreading the neoliberal economic order. And these kind of movements, they don't really take economic issues into consideration. And that's really where neoliberal world order operates. First and foremost, human rights plays a role in this because it provides the language. And that's a really fascinating thing to think about what you just said, because we had started on the point that the, you know, the folks in the lab behind the human rights discourse attempted to make it philosophically neutral, attempted to make it something that could be universal. Surprise, surprise, it's actually extremely particular. It's extremely European, it's extremely elite. And it's not only being wielded and used against people that don't
fit into its definition of who is sort of this normative human being that they have in mind, right? But it's also doing work to try to produce that type of human being, right? That's fascinating to me. Like you take the women of Cairo, or the women of Afghanistan, and it's not neutral as to, you know, who's the better, who's fully human, right? I think that's the question that is the provocative way to put it, and that Assad kind of uses that language, right? If you have two women in Afghanistan, and one of them is making, is calling, again, full circle, calling to their rights to be honored by the first verse of Surah Nisa, right? Appealing to their rights through Allah, and for the arham, right? The natural sort of kinship rights. And you have woman number two, who's appealing to human rights discourse, to gender autonomy, to moral autonomy, individualism. Universal human rights is not neutral as to which one of those two women is more human, right? And that's the scary thing. And actually, it will fund education, you know, and it will actually even drop bombs sometimes, in order to sort of favor one over the other, or to produce one and to sort of marginalize the other. Yes, you're right. You're absolutely right to point that out. And, you know, you said that producing the right subject, right? And Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, may Allah bless him, he looks at Europe, right? That's his kind of context and his specialization in terms of like immediate political history. And he shows us that, you know, in these Islamophobic times, and this anxiety over immigration, over the last
several decades, you see a pattern in the European governments with respect to changes that have been made in how people will migrate to those countries from Muslim majority lands, and the types of immigration tests that they're now subject to. We were talking earlier about how human rights are weaponized, right? So an interesting observation on how sexual freedom is weaponized by imperial governments against Muslim subjects, like she has talked about this specifically. And she, in addition to what Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad has shown us, is that now it's your opinion on gay marriage that is amazing, right? In terms of, you know, you said who is fully human, but we can say who is fully fit to be a subject of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, who is fit to be a citizen. And increasingly, ever since the French Revolution, Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen, increasingly, the rights that you have as a human are only coherent within the democratic republic. And who can have even their citizenship revoked, if you're looking at programs like PREVENT and programs like CVE, who now becomes the legitimate target of state surveillance, state violence, right? Like these, it's scary stuff, but it's true, is that the human and the fully human and the subhuman, right, it kind of falls along the lines that are laid out by the human rights discourse. So, I mean, we've covered extensively the seedy underbelly of human rights discourse, but we promised that we would finish on opportunities for appropriation, and I think that is interesting. So, you know, one of the, I think the entry point for me into this conversation is that I happen to have two interviews in one week, one time, one was with Dr. Shadi and Musri,
and the other was with Yasir Qadhi, and we were talking about, they said completely opposite things when it came to politics in a secular democracy. We're talking about the need to be consistent, right? And so Dr. Shadi was kind of saying, look, there's no need to be consistent, okay? You can use secular politics, you can use, I think in this case, the human rights discourse, even if you have criticisms of it, even if you completely believe it's a bunch of baloney or, you know, whatever. And then Sheikh Yasir Qadhi was saying, on the other hand, it's like, no, we have a duty to be consistent, and we have to be sort of adhering to all of it or none of it. And so I want to sort of, I hope this isn't an imposition, see if, you know, indicate if it makes sense to you, but if we're so critical of human rights as an enterprise, as a discourse, as a tradition, okay, do we have a warrant? And do we have a justification, then, to use it sort of to our own ends, so to speak? That's the first question. And the second question would be, well, what would that look like? If the answer is yes, or under certain conditions, yes, then what are the opportunities for using human rights discourse? And I guess the final thing would be, then, what are some things that we have to be careful of, while using it, so that we don't end up reifying some of the problems with it? That's a great way to end. So I would say, yes, absolutely. True knowledge is the purview of the believer, right? And within human rights discourse, you find truths that you can get behind as a Muslim, that, you know, the dignity of the human person, right? He's got the book on that. And so, certainly, if we find small quotations of that truth in other people's discourses, even though those discourses have foundations that are egocentric, and philosophically incompatible with our broader beliefs as Muslims, absolutely, we can appropriate that knowledge. Why not?
But, you know, that's just my kind of understanding and perspective. And I'll give a few examples to illustrate why I think that has to be done. Number one, you speak to people in a language that they understand. And again, going back to my earlier remark about what language is, it's not just, you know, the vocabulary that we're exchanging right now, and the rules of grammar, but it's the values. And people value human rights as a discourse universally, even if they're not fully comprehending its totality, right? And we ought to get behind it and use it where it's appropriate for us. So, in the case of Palestine, right? We would really come out openly and say that human rights is not a legitimate way to measure if there is justice or injustice in a specific political conflict. You know, when I was in Palestine, I did some fieldwork many years ago. We found, I found and documented all of the ways that the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, in a couple of cities, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, and Nablus, and Jericho, how those violations, how the Israeli occupation was violating in everyday life, the covenants that the State of Israel had been a signatory to in international relations. That's a valuable exercise, right? It's a way of making a claim. And who knows, you know, what's going to happen and, you know, disregards the human rights of Palestinian people openly. It has no meaning. So you're kind of saying that, if I can translate, you're basically saying that we're almost calling on people to make good on their own commitments, right? It's like you guys are saying that you believe in human rights. Well, here's an inconsistency. I'm asking you based off of
what you've signed up for yourself, to fully, to more fully embrace or to practice this particular thing. And that doesn't contradict me, maybe on the side or in a different venue, problematizing human rights discourse writ large. But, you know, instrumentally, or we could say, strategically, right, I might call upon people to make good on their commitments and promises. That's kind of what you're saying. Exactly. Yeah, that's, that's the more concise way of putting it. And, and I think that both are necessary, right? To be critical of the discourse where we find harm in it is necessary. And to be affirming of the discourse where we find good in it is necessary, because it's not like black and white, right? It's not like harm and benefit a lot of times, like in, in the political realm, you know, not in a sacred text, but in the practical lived reality of everyday life, you find the harm and the benefit are often intertwined. And so when we do these both exercises, we're helping to separate the wheat from the tare, so to speak. There's two really interesting examples that may or may not fit, actually, from the seerah of the Prophet, peace be upon him, that this reminds me of, and one of them is the boycott in the Meccan period, right? Because you have sort of, you know, the, the Muslims kind of betting on the Quraysh being people of their, of their word, right? Or actually, that's the second example I'm thinking of. When it comes to the boycott, particularly, you're actually sort of relying on their tribalism, right? And Islam has deep, trenchant critiques of tribalism. However, what was sort of scandalous about the boycott during the Meccan context was that you've got people that are boycotting people from their own tribe, just because now they've accepted it of a different faith. And so you actually had a lot of grumbling and a lot of people that were like, wait a second, this, this
doesn't feel right. And there was actually, eventually, even some popular pressure on the chiefs of the Quraysh to end the boycott, because they felt uncomfortable. So it was almost this interesting sort of thing. Well, yeah, we're definitely criticizing tribalism. But at the same time, there's a way in which we're going to use the ascribed to tribalism of these people against them in some sort of way. And the second example is when the, in the Medinan period, when the Muslims march on Mecca to make Umrah, right, the Prophet ﷺ gets his dream. And he goes unprepared, you know, not ready for a battle, right, just with complete tawakkul and trust, and shows up and he puts the Quraysh in a super awkward position, because their entire political legitimacy is based off of receiving the pilgrims, and facilitating the pilgrimage, right. And even though Allah ﷻ in Surah Tawbah, especially like blasts them for their hypocrisy in this, and they're, you know, sort of, it's all for show, etc, etc. Like they lost the plot, they, they, you know, neglected the main thing, which was to worship Allah alone. But basically, the Muslims are almost betting on, you know, obviously, they're trusting Allah, but they're almost betting on the Quraysh's own sense of their commitment to facilitating the pilgrimage, to not basically just slaughter them in broad daylight. So I don't know, you know, Allah knows best whether, when we do these sorts of analogical reasoning, if that actually fits the situation or not. But it occurred to me, it occurred to me that it could be an analog of sort of, you know, you're trying to appeal to people where they're at, you're using the good parts of what they're at least aspiring to, in order to try to eke out something that is, in the end, just. Masha'Allah. Yeah, no, I hadn't, I hadn't considered that, masha'Allah, but the political lessons for us from these illustrious stories, there's so much potential there. It, as you were speaking, it
reminded me that how Allah in the Qur'an, forgive me, I can't give you the, the exact place, but refers to the the people of the book, if only they would follow their own law. Probably, again, not an analogy that fits precisely, but in terms of the way we're thinking about the broader principles. Right, yeah, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is like criticizing their hypocrisy, and that's not to say that those laws are valid today, they've been abrogated, but the point that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is making in that ayah is that the fact that they're not applying their own law shows their hypocrisy, because at that point, the people of the book were coming to the Promised Prophet ﷺ for a ruling, and then they would pick whatever was easier, the ruling from their own book or the ruling that was given to them by the Muslims. And so there's, you're right, I mean, there is this sort of instruction to at least demonstrate your sincerity by being consistent and making good on the things that you are sort of ascribing yourself to. That's pretty fascinating. So, in the same vein, the legitimacy that the human rights discourse enjoys universally today can be used to speak against the excesses of the military in Palestine, right? Because in areas like education, I mean, that is a good any Muslim can get behind. People have a right for their schools not to be dismantled, people have a right for access to health care to not be systematically barred, people have a right for water sources to not be barred, right? That's something any person, let alone person of faith, would be able to kind of support and advocate. And the human rights language provides us with some of the ways of doing that, and saying to a government like that one, at least be consistent, be sincere in your outward expressed commitment to some of these human rights norms. Yeah, no, that's completely fair, and that makes total sense. So is there anything, and I guess the last point that we
should probably wrap up, is there anything that somebody who's engaged in that work of deploying human rights selectively should be aware of? Is there any potential pitfalls, or any like minefields, like how could it go afoul? Human rights non-governmental organizations work all over the globe, and they're very specific to the places where they are offering very particular services, like micro loans, or working to regenerate land that is no longer arable. So I don't think there's a single pitfall I could share with you. It would really have to do with your community of advocacy, and kind of the specific historical conditions and material conditions of the place where you are working. In general, I think that the intellectual history of Western civilization, and Western philosophy, and political theorizing would be a good supplement, and I'm saying that because it's my area, right? So it's the only thing I can speak of, but it can help to provide a bigger picture. A lot of times, living in a liberal democracy like the United States, and being a part of these universal discourses like human rights, maybe we've all learned to not dig deeper, or maybe to not take things at a surface level, like we accept the universal, right? The universal says, hey, this is for everybody, all times, all places, and I think learning to sometimes problematize that through education, not just for the sake of problematizing it, right? Not just to say anything is wrong, and anything feminist is evil, and anything this is that, like that's very binary, mannequin way of thinking, but instead to kind of read into things, and look into primers, and that can help someone who's interested in doing that kind of advocacy to get maybe a bigger picture of some of these underlying questions. Who's the human being? Some of these existential questions that lie at the center of
those. Fantastic. Well, I think that's a really great place to end it, and I have to say it's very enjoyable. You know, I'm also political theory background, my first background, so it's rare to find someone with such similar research interests and training, and this is a very enjoyable conversation, and I hope we have many more, inshallah. So thank you very much for your thoughts, and a lot to think about, and I think that this conversation will really, really inform some of the other conversations that we hope to have on this podcast, and when we get into the details of other things that are dependent upon the human rights framework, such as women's rights and feminism, such as LGBTQ and rights surrounding that. So again, thank you very much. Jazakallah khair for having me. Ameen wayakum. That's all for this time. Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala knows best, and we look forward to our next episode. Subhanakallahumma wa bihamdika sharawan la ilaha illa anta, astaghfirullah wa atubu ilayk, salamualikoum wa rahmatullah. you
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