Where's Omar? Where Is Justice (original) (raw)
Related papers
Zara Khan Refractions Through the Secular Islam Human Rights and Universality
CUNY Academic Works, 2016
Universal human rights (HR) are often theorized as philosophically neutral. Because they do not espouse any particular theory of the human being, it is argued, they can be reasonably appropriated by all. In this thesis, I explore HR’s universality claim, by focusing on the discourse’s secular foundation. In the universal human right to freedom of religion, I find a distinctly modern grammar of ‘religion,’ one that separates ‘religion’ from politics and power, law from morality, and the public and private realms. The modern concept of religion also espouses a secular theory of the human, insofar as the human is defined as morally autonomous and self-sovereign. To test my critique of human rights’ universality claims vis-à-vis their secularity, I survey a number of theoretical engagements with human rights discourse from contemporary Muslim scholars. Positions in this literature range from full endorsement of the philosophical and moral foundations of HR, to trenchant critiques of their secular bases. I propose the Qur’anic term din as a conceptual alternative to ‘religion’ for understanding the tremendous variation in contemporary Islamic political thought on human rights. The absence of consensus among reasoned Muslim arguments about human rights significantly challenges HR’s universality claims.
2009
An-Na'im, originally from Sudan, is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School (Atlanta, USA). He is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and human rights in cross-cultural perspectives. His research interests also include constitutionalism in Islamic and African countries, and Islam and politics. He directs several research projects which focus on advocacy strategies for reform through internal cultural transformation. Website http://www.law.emory.edu/aannaim
One Nation Under God? Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Changing Fiqh of citizenship, CI 8(3) 217-37 (2014)
Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, 2014
In the wake of the Arab Revolutions of 2011, countries in the Middle East are grappling with how Islamists might be included within a regime of democratic political pluralism and how their aspirations for an “Islamic state” could affect the citizenship status of non-Muslims. While Islamic jurisprudence on this issue has traditionally classified non-Muslims in Islamic society as protected peoples or dhimma, endowed with what the authors term “minority citizenship”, this article will examine how the transnational intellectual Wasatiyya or Centrist movement, of which Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is the figurehead, have sought to develop a new fiqh of citizenship in which Muslims and non-Muslims have equal civil and political rights. This article will focus on Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the basis that his very recent shift in 2010 on the issue is yet to be studied in depth, as well as in view of the fact that the dilemma faced by reformist Islamic scholars - how to integrate modern concepts into a legal tradition while simultaneously arguing for that tradition’s continuing relevance and authority - is for him rendered particularly acute, given that this tradition is itself the very source of his own authority and relevance. It will therefore be argued that the legacy of the Islamic legal tradition structures his discourse in a very specific way, thereby having the potential to render it more persuasive to his audience, and worthy of a more detailed examination.
Secular state, citizenship and the matrix of globalized religious identity
2007
Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2044239 Secular State, Citizenship and the Matrix of Globalized Religious Identity Tahmina Rashid* No man has a right … to treat any other man “tolerantly”, for tolerance is the assumption of superiority1. Evolution of Secularism and Secular State There seems to be a general consensus that Islamic/Muslim values are incompatible with secular/western values.
Introduction: On the Muslim Question: Philosophy, Politics, and the Western Street
On the Muslim Question, 2013
The Jewish question was fundamental for politics and philosophy in the Enlightenment. In our time, as the Enlightenment fades, the Muslim question has taken its place. The emancipation of the Jews was central to Enlightenment philosophy and politics. Enlightened statesmen endeavored to change the laws that had relegated Jews to second-class citizenship, and to end the pogroms that had filled Europe with terror. The freedom of Jews to vote, to participate in politics as equals, and to walk through their cities as equals accompanied the expansion of democracy and marked the achievement of liberal constitutions. As the West became more enlightened, more liberal, more democratic, it left behind the laws and customs that had required discrimination against Jews. So it was in philosophy. Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question" saw the Jew as the site where post-Enlightenment Europe confronted the specter of theology in citizenship. The Jewish question enfolded questions of citizenship, religion, difference and belonging, integration
Secular Governance and Islamic Law: The Globalization of the Minority Question
Sociology of Islam, 2019
In this paper I examine the uses of the concept of minority by contemporary Muslim public intellectuals engaged simultaneously in discussions about the status of Mus-lims in the West and the place of non-Muslims in the Islamic world. I show how the concept of minority-rendered in Arabic through the neologism aqalliyya-is both problematic and indispensable to the discussions taking place in the transnational spaces of Islamic normative debate. Drawing on Saba Mahmood's work, I argue that the minority question is both a strategy of modern secular governance and a tool used by a set of actors pursuing different projects. I suggest that the Islamic traditions that are often seen as foundational to the inequalities that shape the life of non-Muslims in the Middle East are in fact more ambiguous in their effects than they may appear at first sight. Although Islamic legal discourse has been predicated on a hierarchy that places non-Muslims in a subaltern status, it also embodies universalist norms that serve to counter some of these inequalities-even if the goals it articulates and the language it deploys are not always immediately intelligible within a modern context.
Theologies of the West: A Commentary on Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular Age
Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular Age presents a historical anthropology of secularism, one that works with erudition across a diverse array of materials that include political and religious history, texts of international and Egyptian law, modern Arabic literature, and ethnographic interviews. The book does not polemicize against secularism but grapples with the promise of civil and political equality it holds open. Mahmood analyzes the many ways in which this ideal persistently, perhaps even necessarily, runs into contradiction with its social and institutional reality.