Defection from Islam: A Disturbing Human Rights Dilemma
Institute for Islamic Studies of the Evangelical Alliance in Germany - 19 January 2016 - From PROF. DR. CHRISTINE SCHIRRMACHER
Defection from Islam: A Disturbing Human Rights Dilemma
The discussion of human rights flares up when Muslims in an Islamic country convert to Christianity and are threatened with death, as happened a few years ago in Afghanistan and as happens from time to time in other Muslim countries. In the West we immediately regard this as an attack on human rights and a restriction of the freedom of religion, but, in fact, almost all of the Islamic countries signed the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and they regard their actions as consistent with their understanding of human rights.[2] Obviously we face a huge divergence of opinions on the nature of human rights and what it means to protect them, but what is the source of such fundamentally different ways of thinking?
Islamic Human Rights Declarations under the Preamble of the Sharia
The foundations for the widely divergent conceptions of human rights between Islamic countries and the West are ultimately to be found in the Sharia, which is the totality of laws and rules for life which are taken from the Koran and the Muslim tradition under the interpretation of authoritative Muslim theologians. Some Islamic organizations have written human rights declarations in recent decades, though these were not accepted by all Islamic states. Muslim human rights declarations differ foundationally from western human rights declarations in so far as they allocate to the Koran and to the Sharia the highest rank in deciding what rights are allocated to humans. The countries that attempt at least partially to orient their civil law around the Sharia allow human rights officially to be defined and defended only in light of the boundaries provided by the Koran and the Sharia even if some human rights organisations in these countries fight for more rights. For example, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990), article 24, states, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia.” And article 25 continues, “The Islamic Sharia is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.”[3] Clearly this emphasizes the “historical role of the Islamic Ummah which God made the best nation which has given mankind a universal and well balanced civilization in which harmony is established between this life and the hereafter and knowledge is combined with faith.”[4]
https://en.europenews.dk/Defection-from-Islam-A-Disturbing-Human-Rights-Dilemma-129724.html
