Home  Essays Zaid Shakir on Islam and the UDHR
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Zaid Shakir on Islam and the UDHR |
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Written by Zaid Shakir
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Monday, 31 October 2005 |
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Page 3 of 4
Part Three: The Challenge of September 11, 2001
The tragic events of
September 11, 2001 present a clear challenge to the human rights/social
justice imperative of Muslims in North America. The reasons for this
are many and complex. The apocalyptic nature of the attacks of
September 11, 2001, particularly the assault on, and subsequent
collapse of the World Trade Center towers, led many observers to
question the humaneness of a religion which could encourage such
senseless, barbaric slaughter. Islam, the religion identified as
providing the motivation for those horrific attacks, was brought into
the public spotlight as being, in the view of many of its harshest
critics, an anti-intellectual, nihilistic, violent, chauvinistic
atavism.15
The atavistic nature of Islam, in
their view, leads to its inability to realistically accommodate the
basic elements of modern human rights philosophy.16 This inability
was highlighted by the September 11, 2001 attacks in a number of ways.
First of all, the massive and indiscriminant slaughter of civilians
belied, in the view of many critics, any claims that Islam respects the
right to life. If so, how could so many innocent, unsuspecting souls,
be so wantonly sacrificed? Secondly, “Islam’s” refusal to allow for the
peaceful existence of even remote populations of “infidels,” the
faceless dehumanized “other,” calls into question its respect for the
rights of non-Muslims within its socio-political framework. It also
highlights its inability to define that “other” in human terms.
As a link between the accused
perpetrators of the attacks, Osama bin Laden,17 and the Taliban rulers
of Afghanistan was developed by both the United States government and
news media, the human rights position of Islam was called into further
question. The Taliban, by any standards of assessment, presided over a
regime that showed little consideration for the norms governing
international human rights. Much evidence exists, which implicates the
Taliban in violating the basic rights of women, ethnic minorities
(non-Pashtun), the Shi’i religious minority, detainees, artists, and
others, using in some instances, extremely draconian measures. Many of
these violations occurred under the rubric of applying what the regime
identified as Islamic law. The news of Taliban excesses, coupled with
the shock of the events of September 11, 2001, combined to create
tremendous apprehension towards the ability and willingness of Islam to
accommodate a meaningful human rights regime.18
The political climate
existing in America in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 has been
exploited by certain elements in American society to call into question
any humanitarian tendencies being associated with Islam. For example,
in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Daniel Pearle, an act whose
implications are as chilling as the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr.
Pearle’s bosses at the Wall Street Journal, Peter Kann and Paul Steiger
remarked, “His murder is an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of
everything that Danny’s kidnappers claimed to believe in.” Responding
to those comments, Leon Wieseltier, of the New Republic, stated, “The
murder of Daniel Pearle did not make a mockery of what his slaughterers
believe. It was the perfect expression, the inevitable consequence, of
what his slaughterers believe.”19 This, and similar indictments of
Islam, challenge the ability of American Muslims to effectively speak
on human rights issues in obvious ways.
If we examine the actual
nature American Muslim human rights discourse prior to September 11,
2001, we find that it was based in large part on Muslims contrasting
the generalities of the Shari’ah, with the specific shortcomings
American society and history in relevant areas of domestic and
international policy and practice.20 This discourse ignored the
positive human rights strictures contained in sections of the American
constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the UDHR, to which the United
States is a signatory. As in other areas, this inadequate approach
produced a false sense of moral superiority among Muslims in America.
This sense was shattered by the attacks of September 11, 2001, in that
many Americans were suddenly pointing to what they viewed as the
inadequacy of Islamic human rights regimes, their inadequate
philosophical basis, and their failure to guarantee basic human rights
protection, especially for women, religious, racial, and ethnic
minorities living in Muslim lands.
Responding adequately to
these charges will require a radical restructuring of current Islamic
human rights discourse, and the regimes that discourse informs. The
generalities, which formerly sufficed in that discourse will have to be
replaced by concrete, developed policy prescriptions, which stipulate
in well-defined, legal terms, how viable human rights protections will
be extended to groups identified as systematically suffering from human
rights abuses in Muslim realms.
An example of the dangerous
and inadequate generalities alluded to above, can be glimpsed from a
brief examination of the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam
(CDHRI). Article 24 of that document states, “All the rights and
freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic
Shari’ah.”21 Such a statement is meaningless, considering the vast
corpus of subjectively understood literature that could be identified
as comprising the Shari’ah, unless the relevant rulings and principles
of the Shari’ah are spelled out in exacting detail.
While this paper has
consciously avoided mention of those features of Islam which would be
antithetical to the Western concept of personal liberty, such as the
lack of freedom to choose one’s “sexual orientation,” there are major
civil liberties issues which must be addressed, in clear and
unequivocal terms, if Islam’s human rights discourse is to have any
credence. Hiding behind Islam’s cultural, or religious specificity to
avoid providing answers to difficult questions will not advance a
deeper understanding of our faith amongst enlightened circles in the
West. While I in no claim that there will ever be complete
compatibility between Islamic and western human rights schemes, owing
to the separate epistemological bases of each approach, there is room
for a deeper and clearer articulation of what Islam says about
controversial issues such as homosexuality.
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