Human rights in the Islamic tradition

While civic rights are produced by social consensus and pertain within national boundaries, human rights are inherent and undeniable. They aren't dependent on agreement, recognition or negotiation.

The Source of Goodness: 

Human Rights in the Islamic Tradition

KhaledAbou El Fadl

ABC Religion and Ethics4 Dec 2015

Human rights and terrorism both are grand concepts.

Human rights is a grand concept of an ultimate or absolute good - in many ways, like the idea of divinity or like the idea of light.

Terrorism, on the other hand, is a grand concept of an ultimate or absolute evil - very much the antithesis of divinity and the antithesis of light.

Although we human beings, including theologians, jurists and philosophers, produce a remarkable variety of terminology to negotiate our idea of good and our repulsion towards the idea of evil, ultimately we keep going back to this central dichotomous theme.

This theme makes perfect sense to people of faith because it is the theme or the logic of being in a state of grace versus being in a state of the absence of grace; a state of mercy versus the absence of mercy; a state of blessing versus the absence of blessing.

Having said this, we also know that the real challenge for people of faith is the idea of people struggling with this same dynamic but under contemporaneous labels. As powerfully liberating as is the idea of the good, the light and the divine, and as remarkably suffocating as is the idea of the dark, the demonic and the terror-filled or terror-inducing, we human beings have enjoyed a miserable record of taking a concept of the ultimate and the absolute and rendering in practice, its opposite.

That is the real challenge to people of faith through the contemporary notion of human rights.

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