Human Rights
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Abstract
Abdullahi An-Na’im is one of the most prominent and well-regarded contemporary scholars of Muslim legal traditions. In particular, An-Na’im has worked on the relationship between Islam, both generally and in its legal manifestations, and human rights. He has also been a passionate and consistent advocate for Muslims to embrace human rights and for these to be cast in Islamic terms. In Islam and Human Rights, Mashood Baderin, himself a scholar of note of the interplay of Islamic law and human rights, provides a collection of sixteen of An-Na’im’s works, published from 1984 to 2006, which he groups thematically into four parts: ‘‘Islam Between Universalism and Secularism’’, ‘‘Islam and Human Rights in the Muslim World’’, ‘‘Topical Issues in Islam and Human Rights Discourse’’, and, to conclude, ‘‘A Theory of Interdependence’’. Baderin prefaces these selections of An-Na’im’s own writing with an introductory essay in which he presents a conceptual synthesis of the major strands of An-Na’im’s thought. Overall, this assembly allows one to readily and easily engage with the major ideas in An-Na’im’s oeuvre in one accessible volume. An-Na’im has long maintained and advocated for two important principles, which Baderin highlights: first, that ‘‘Muslim people have the right to conduct their constitutional affairs in conformity with the principles of Islam’’, and second, that this must be ‘‘subject to the obligation of respecting the legitimate rights of all individuals [non-Muslims included] and groups within Islamic countries’’ (pp. xxiii–xxiv). This combination, however, is not self-evident in several respects. First, it is not certain what an agreed set of ‘‘the principles of Islam’’ might be, and second, it is not clear that any such set of Islamic principles could always be coherently aligned with the legitimate rights of all individuals, including non-Muslims. An-Na’im deals with this tension by famously advocating in favour of an ‘‘Islamic Reformation’’, in which a robust civil-liberties regime and the protection of human rights may be constructed upon bases which are ‘‘Islamically redeemed’’. Probably the most comprehensive and elaborately expressed version of this vision is found in AnNa’im’s 2008 book Islam and the Secular State. As the title of this book makes clear, An-Na’im argues that a secular (albeit not a laic) state is an institutional requirement to realize his principles effectively. In this, he is criticized—sometimes aggressively—by those who feel that he is too Western. These critiques question and sometimes deny the possibility that An-Na’im suggests, namely that one can find an authentically Islamic legal and political framework, in the sense of something that can be derived from the classical heritage of Muslim thought, that is still fully respectful of civil and human rights, including those of non-Muslims, and which can operate as the backbone of a secular state. Baderin’s introductory and framing essay does an admirable job of presenting An-Na’im’s thought. In particular, he formulates a ‘‘three-angled philosophy’’ in An-Na’im’s work, namely: (i) the philosophy of cross-cultural universality, (ii) the philosophy for internal reformation of Islamic law, and (iii) the philosophy for reaffirming secularism for Muslim states (p. xxxviii).