Islam and Human Rights Tradition and Politics, 2nd Ed. by Ann Elizabeth Mayer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

Abstract

Professor Mayer' second edition of her Islam and Human Rights, like the
ftrst edition, aims essentially to study comparatively "selected civil and political
rights formulations in international law and in actual and proposed rights
schemes purporting to embody Islamic principles, with a critical appraisal of the
latter in terms of international law and Islamic jurisprudence" (p. xi). While
acknowledging that the title of her book is misleading (because it is not only
Islam that determines a Muslim's attitude), by the end of the book the reader
finds that the different conservative interpretations of Islam that developed during
the Middle Ages and are kept within authoritacjve books of jurisprudence are made responsible for Muslims’ dealing with human rights issues. However, the
author does not elaborate much on the repression of secular regimes, which
adhere neither to international human rights nor to medieval Islamic legal thinking.
The question then relates not to Islam as such, but to the nature of politics
that is being exercised, whether in the name of Islam or secularism.
Mayer is emphatic in not attributing repression to Islam and is very keen to
recognize the multiplicity of ideas and trends within the Islamic world today
toward the issues of human rights. But what unifies these different trends is their
heavy reliance on religious principles of Islamic sources-meaning medieval
books of jurisprudence and not the Qur’an or the Sunnah. For Islam, whatever
that may mean to the author, is used for both political protest against undemocratic
regimes and for repression by these regimes. In other words, Islam has not
specified what is equivalent to international human rights and has no proper
scheme for human rights. But had the author looked at the original texts of the
Qur’an and the Sunnah, she could have developed a scheme of rights that then
could be compared to the international human rights standards. Again, the
medieval Islamic literature is not devoid of a scheme of rights, though they may
not be exactly what she wants to label as a scheme of human rights ...