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Dr. Muqtedar Khan's Response: Islamic legal systems were articulated in the Middle Ages before the advent of the all-powerful centralized state, which necessitates constitutional protection of rights from state power. Modern Islamic law can derive individual rights (see the Universal Declaration of Islamic Human Rights) from Islamic sources. For example, the Qur'anic verse "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256) can function as the Islamic equivalent of the American First Amendment. M. H. Kamali, in two brilliant books, FREEDOM, EQUALITY AND JUSTICE IN ISLAM (ITS, 2002) and THE DIGNITY OF MAN: AN ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE (ITS, 2002) demonstrates how individual rights inhere in Islamic sources. The focus of the Sharia is on social justice, and Muslim thinkers need to advance contemporary understanding of social justice that includes individual rights and guarantees equality, including gender parity.
Dr. Daniel Pipes's Rebuttal:
Professor Khan says that the Universal Declaration of Islamic Human Rights can be derived from Islamic sources, but in fact they deeply and extensively contradict each other -- for details, see Ann Elizabeth Mayer, ISLAM AND HUMAN RIGHTS: TRADITION AND POLITICS (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991). The Qur'anic verse "there is no compulsion in religion" has nothing in common with the First Amendment: to take just one point, the Qur'an imposes the death penalty on apostates from Islam, something, last I checked, the U.S. Constitution does not do. This is the reformist apologetic for Islam (saying that it's just the same as what the West believes in) and it is unconvincing as it is intellectually fraudulent.
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Dr. Daniel Pipes's Response:
The question assumes that Islam is an unchanging entity; but it has been evolving for fourteen centuries and will continue to do so. Islam as understood today tends not to be compatible with safeguarding individual rights, but that can change if Muslims are willing and able to rethink some premises of their religion.
Dr. Muqtedar Khan's Rebuttal:
I agree. It is problematic to treat Islam as a nondynamic concept and also to treat its civilizational manifestations as monolithic. Islamic law itself is very diverse and Islamic practices are kaleidoscopic. Nothing, including the understanding of what constitutes the Sharia, is frozen or static. Today, the Muslim world suffers from a deep sense of insecurity, largely from the West, which it rightly or wrongly sees as a force determined to separate Muslims from Islam. We have seen how insecurity can immediately undermine the protection of rights. Even the U.S., when insecure, severely limits individual rights. The passage of the Patriot Act in the U.S. -- the most powerful and the most democratic state -- undermines many rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. When Muslim societies will feel safer and will be assured that the West is not seeking to recolonize them or destroy their faith, I am confident they too will become more democratic and protective of individual rights. Recent Pew studies confirm that Muslims deeply fear the U.S., and this fear is heightened by the Bush doctrine of preemptive strike. When more secure, Muslim understanding of their faith becomes more liberal, as in Islamic Spain, and when insecure, Muslim interpretation of their faith becomes more conservative, as in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
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