Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Further Clarification of Islamic 'Human Rights'

Yesterday I critiqued a National Post editorial which I thought was over-impressed with the candy-coated words of Canadian Muslim leaders, including the Canadian Council of Imams. Prior to the latest round of terrorism arrests, a.k.a. Project Samosa, the CCI has released a statement containing a set of points about where they stand as Muslims and Canadians. The points were meant to reassure us that, from the imams' point of view, we all stand together, lock, stock and "human rights". However, one of the points affirms that imams
believe that every society must be allowed to express and celebrate humanity’s profound cultural diversity, as long as the expression of that diversity does not include the compulsion of any individual to violate their own human rights, or their personal values, or their human nature, or otherwise threaten the common good of all people.
which, as I explained, is a way of weaseling out of having to hew to kafir law in a kafir land that "violates" the "human rights" associated with Islam's Divine law.
 
The book I'm reading, Ibn Warraq's collection of essays that bears the quasi-Borscht Belt-sounding title Virgins? What Virgins? ("That was no virgin," quipped the funnyman, "that was my wife.") further clarifies the conept of "human rights" under sharia. As you'll see, it is entirely different from--and entirely at odds with--how the West has traditionally understood the concept. Ibn Warraq quotes "recent Muslim thinking A.K. Brohi, a former minister of law and religious affairs in Pakistan who has often written on human rights from an Islamic perspective." Brohi writes:
Human duties and rights have been vigorously deined and their orderly enforcement is the duty of the whole organized communities and the task is specifically entrusted to the law enforcement organs of the state. The individual, if necessary, has to be sacrified in order that the life of the organism be saved. Collectivity has a special sanctity attached to it in Islam.
[In Islam] there are no "human rights" or "freedoms" admissable to man, in essence the believer owes "obligation or duties to God if only because he is called upon to obey the Divine Law and such human rights as he is made to acknowledge seem to stem from his primary duty to obey God."
In other words, when it comes to "human rights," they answer to a higher authority--a much higher authority--than "The Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

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