Al Hurriyat al 'Ammah fi al Dawlah al Islamiyah By Rashed Ghannoushi. Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al Wahdah al 'Arab'iyah, 1993, 382 pp.

Abstract

Rashed Ghannoushi is renown for being among the first to venture
into the forefront of international debates tackling issues from an Islamic
perspective. Among these debates, strengthened by the end of the cold
war, one can cite what are usually called normative theories of world politics:
human rights, individual autonomy vs. state autonomy, ethics of
intervention, and so forth. At present, such issues are being discussed from
a new perspective and are, at least apparently, less influenced by the inherently
conflicting interests and politics of the two superpowers that formed
the former bipolar international system. Relatively speaking, the debates
are taking place on a more human-oriented reasoning plane and with a
higher degree of freedom from politics-directed approaches. The recent
and perhaps most distinguished work of Ghannoushi, al Hurriyat al
'Ammah fi al Dawlah al Islamiyah (Public Liberties in the Islamic State),
is a pioneering account of such debates, even though it does not address
them all.
In its three lengthy chapters, the book is preoccupied with human
rights in the Islamic state. Chapter one speaks of individual freedom and
individual rights as understood by Islam. For Ghannoushi, freedom is the
embarking point where the individual decides freely and by his/her own
will to become a Muslim. Due to its very fundamental nature, freedom is
a basic and a genuine value in itself. Ghannoushi gives special primacy to
two aspects of freedom. The first is the freedom of belief, which includes
the freedom of expression and religious worship, where the individual has
the right to choose the belief he/she values without any obligation. Ghannoushi
goes further and discusses one of the most controversial issues:
when a Muslim makes a conscious decision to change his/her religion. In
most of the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence, such an action
causes the application of a penalty to punish the newly non-Muslim individual.
Yet Ghannoushi, by interpreting the Prophet's position toward
specific cases and that of Abu Bakr at the time of his war against the apostates
(al murtadin), concludes that these cases were treated as political, as
opposed lo religious, defections. Tribes who defected during the reign of
Abu Bakr were manipulated into threatening the (political) order and the
existence of the Islamic society. In this case, waging a war of deterrence
is plausible. The case of an individual is of lesser importance from the ...