Islamic law and human rights: A contribution to an ongoing debate

In this essay the author criticizes two opposite approaches to the relationship between Islam and human rights: the incriminating and the apologetic approach. They are either anachronistic in that they judge the rules of classical Islamic jurisprudence by present‐day standards, or they entirely ignore its heritage. The author attempts instead to develop a new approach whereby classical Islamic jurisprudence is analyzed in its historical context. In order to examine whether Islam recognized a notion of fundamental rights, the author first tries to establish to what extent the notion of legal equality is recognized in Islamic law. Secondly, he examines two hierarchical legal relationships, viz. that between master and slave and that between husband and wife, in order to find which basic and inalienable rights Islamic law assigns to the weaker party in these relationships. His conclusion is that classical Islamic law offers points of departure for the development of a modern theory of human rights rooted in Islamic notions.>