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Recep Senturk - Research-in-Progress Documents
1. Presentation - How to Uphold Human Sanctity in a Foggy Time?(A brief address to a Christian community at Emory). Download in MS Word format. 2. Brief Presentation - Sociology of Rights: Human Rights in Islam between Universal and Communal Perspectives. Download in MS Word format. | View as HTML 3. Draft - Sociology of Rights: Human Rights in Islam between Universal and Communal Perspectives. Download in MS Word format. Back to Recep Senturk - Research Project Brief Presentation - Sociology of Rights: Human Rights in Islam between Universal and Communal Perspectives. Welcome everyone. Thank you for coming over. I thank Prof. An-Na’im for giving me this opportunity. I also thank my discussants, Prof. Steve Tipton and Prof. Frank Lechner. I am grateful to Prof. Johan Van Der Vyver and Prof. Herald Berman for their contribution. My special thanks to my colleagues and staff in the fellowship for Islam and Human Rights. Since I have a very limited time, my speech will be a brief summary of my paper. For those who are interested, the paper is available. This is a work in progress and I appreciate your contributions. The idea I want to convey to you today is a parsimonious one: I am therefore I have rights. I argue that this claim can be justified on both secular and religious grounds. I will demonstrate how, using the example of the Islamic legal tradition. I came to Atlanta from Istanbul 3 months ago. One of the things I miss about Istanbul is the horns of ferry boats, crossing the Bosphorus in the foggy days. Especially during the fall season, the mornings are usually foggy. Boats honk to each other to establish communication because fog prevents them from seeing each other. The only way to avoid collision is to communicate by blowing their horn. Ruth Berman has an excellent poem describing this communication. There are some copies for those who want to read it. It seems to me that humanity is going through a foggy time. Despite the high-tech communication systems we use, some respected scholars still prophesize that civilizations are on a collision course. Communication and transportation have developed so much that the world has almost become a village. Consequently, the entire humanity has become neighbors. However, love has yet to grow among neighbors. Neighborly relations among civilizations on the globe require universal law and love. This goal can only be achieved by integrating inclusive or universalistic perspectives from law, social sciences, humanities and theology. United they should stand against the exclusivist calls in their disciplines. I think that a new line of cleavage is being drawn between exclusive and inclusive positions from all cultures. The exclusivists from all sides argue against universal law and love while the inclusivists strive to find a common ground for peaceful relations. Currently, it seems that the exclusivism increasingly steels the voice of the mainstream majority, who should stand up, take back its voice and speak for itself. In the Muslim world everyone heard about Jerry Falwell’s unfortunate statements about Prophet Muhammad, but unfortunately, no one heard many good things other Westerners said about their Prophet. It is the same way, in the West, everyone knows Bin Laden but if you ask them the name of a Muslim who advocates peace between Muslims and non-Muslims, they can hardly give you one. Yet they are the majority. In all sides, we should not let the extremists to act like the self-appointed representatives of the majority. In this foggy time, the inclusivists should maintain communication to make the world a more neighborly village. If one ideology claims monopoly over cultural values that belong to humanity as a whole, then we are on a collision course. Among these universally respected values, human rights occupy a distinguished place. Those who subscribe to universal values, should also recognize the need, the possibility and the right for each culture to justify and interpret human rights in their own terms by mobilizing indigenous notions of justice, human sanctity and freedom. The voice of major religions and secular ideologies in the world is for universalism even though politics might have tempered them over time. There is a solid foundation in major religious and secular cultures for universal human rights. Yet, in some cases, it might have been overshadowed by exclusivism, and thus needs to be unearthed, reclaimed and rekindled. One such example is Islam. Classical Islamic law already has a firm ground to justify universal human rights and sanctity for each child of Adam and Eve, irrespective of inherited, innate, ascribed or gained qualities regarding race, religion, sex, language, culture and class. The classical Islamic doctrine provides the antecedents or the basic concept of universal human rights, but not as elaborated as human rights law was after WWII. Abu Hanifa, the founder of the Hanafi School who lived in Iraq during the eighth century, postulated his precept in the form of a legal maxim. He said: “Basic human rights are due for humanity.” Likewise, al-Miydani, another Hanafi scholar from the 19th century said: “A person has rights by virtue of her existence.” Who is, then, a human in Islamic thought? All human beings are created perfectly. They are born with perfect souls. All human beings are created in the image of God, not physically, but spiritually, in the sense that their attributes resemble those of God regarding mercy, knowledge, love, and justice. Human soul is a divine breath. Physically they are not different than animals, but spiritually they are higher than the angels. Every human being is ordained by creation to serve as a vicegerent of God on earth, represent God’s will and implement justice. God’s love and providence for humanity are universal, for believers and infidels, for the pious and the sinful. A believer is also required to love God and His entire creation and treat them accordingly with compassion. By extrapolating from numerous verses of the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Abu Hanifa postulated that all human beings must have the right to life, property, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, family and honor. He claimed that the common objective of all legal systems is to protect six values: life, property, mind, religion, honor and family. He also claimed that the legitimacy of political authority is contingent upon protection of basic human rights; all individuals, communities and states are responsible for protecting their own rights and the rights of everyone else on the earth. Yet not all agreed with Abu Hanifa. Shafii, Malik and Ibn Hanbal, the founders of major schools of law in Islam argued that these rights should be granted exclusively to the citizens of the Islamic state, be they Muslims or non-Muslims, who have a compact with the Muslim state (dhimmah). The tension in Islamic law between the advocates of “universal human rights” and “civil rights” is observable today in US politics as well. It is a tension between exclusive and inclusive attitudes, which is a universal phenomenon in all cultures and societies. Revelation and reason concurrently serve the production of Islamic law. The methodology of Islamic jurisprudence, particularly from the perspective of the Rational School (Ahl al-Ra’y), made it possible for Muslims to combine various religious (divinely inspired, deriving from scriptures) and secular (rationally inspired, deriving from the human mind) sources of law. There are two commonly known religious source of Islamic law: the Koran and the Hadith, the two scriptures of Islam. Among the secular sources are consensus of scholars, judicial analogy, custom, necessity, utility and forestalling harm. Islamic law is not sacred, divine or canonical in the Christian sense; it shares features of both religious and secular law. The universalistic view, originating from Abu Hanifa, was very influential in Islamic history. Spain under the Umayyads and India under the Mughals are among paramount examples. Yet the most significant example is provided by the Ottoman State (1299-1920), which is the largest and the longest lived Muslim state. Ottomans adopted the universalistic approach and implemented the Millets System which they inherited from previous Islamic states. The Millets System granted autonomy to every religious community in its internal affairs regarding religion, law and education. Thus the Jews who escaped from persecution in Spain found sanctuary in Istanbul. The result was concurrently operating legal systems. This pluralist system required justification, which was provided by Islamic law on the grounds that all religions and legal systems serve in their own terms the same common goal, protection of basic human rights and sanctity. Furthermore, during the 19th century, the Ottomans reformed the structure of Islamic law and state, bringing them in line with their parallels in Europe. In 1808, Sultan Mahmud II signed the Charter of Alliance whereby he gave up some of his powers to the Advisory Council ( Mejlis-i Meshveret ), composed of dignitaries. In 1839 came the first human rights declaration by a Muslim state, granting equal rights to Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. In 1876 came the first constitution and democratically elected parliament. The 19th century Ottomans demonstrated to the entire world that Islam is compatible with human rights and democracy. You might ask, what happened to these reforms? Unfortunately, with the fall of the Ottomans, the bridge between modern universal human rights and Islamic law also fell. Ottoman reforms did not register in the minds of Muslim politicians and intellectuals from the subsequent generations who found it expedient to reject human rights as a Western invention. The chain of memory has been broken. Today, the universalistic position in Islamic law is not represented by any state; nor do intellectuals know much about it. The current discussion in the Muslim world concerning human rights and democracy has started from ground zero. Consequently, the questions Muslims tackle today are the same questions Ottomans resolved two centuries ago. My research aims to unearth the universalistic approach in the classical Islamic law and to built upon it in justifying universal human rights. To this end, I argue “I am therefore I have rights.” Or better, we may cheer in chorus, “We all are therefore we all have rights.” Back to Recep Senturk - Research Documents | Back to Recep Senturk - Research Project |
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