1. Islamism and International Law.
The atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime during the Second World War, and the sheer brutality of the Japanese towards the conquered and prisoners of war led to a strong resolve among the world’s post-war leaders to create an international organisation based on the rights of the individual.
In what has since become a fractured and divided world, it can be difficult to imagine the overwhelming consensus following WWII that “humanity could do better.”
The United Nations was founded on the principle that everyone, regardless of race, creed, culture or gender was endowed with inalienable rights, including freedom of thought, conscience and belief, and the right to personal autonomy. These principles were first enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 which, although not an international treaty, has since been adopted as a set of guiding principles by all 192 member states of the United Nations. Those principles were later codified into the form of two international conventions (treaties): the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of 1966 that are binding on all signatory states.
Among the rights so enshrined are the right to have a religion but (under pressure from the Islamic States) there is no right to change or leave your religion. In many Islamic states it is still a crime to leave Islam (apostasy), and in seven of them apostasy is punishable by death. But as many Islamic scholars have pointed out[1], this is in conflict with any reasonable interpretation of the Quranic statement that “there can be no compulsion in religion.”
The ICCPR has since been adopted by 173 of the 193 member states of the UN. and the ICESCR by 171 of the members, but the Covenants lack teeth. There are no sanctions against states that fail to honour their commitments under the covenants, no penalties for failure to conform, only the power of public and international opinion.
The UDHR and the Covenants were weakened when in 1990 the 57 member states of the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) which undermines the Universality of the UDHR by making all rights in the CDHRI “subject to the Islamic Sharia”. [2]
The CDHRI has been strongly criticised in the Human Rights Council by, inter alia, the International Commission of Jurists and Humanists International.[3] Claiming to be “complimentary” to the UDHR, the CDHRI is clearly intended as an alternative, abandoning the universality of the UDHR in favour of a set of limited rights conforming to the Islamic Sharia.
The malign influence of the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (the OIC) within the United Nations exercesed through its de-facto control of the organisation has been a major obstacle to the promotion and protection of the internationally agreed standards of human rights.
2. Freedom of Religion or Belief
By adopting the CDHRI, the OIC has clearly aligned itself politically with Islamism, abandoning any pretence to support freedom of religion or belief or freedom of expression. Their dubious ‘justification’ for imposing the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy in spite of the Quranic injunction that there can be no compulsion in religion (Quran 2:256) is that the truth of Islam is so self-evident that apostacy can only possibly be the result of ignorance or compulsion!
But Islamism does have its opponents within the Islamic world and we are seeing the increasing influence of more liberal interpretations of Islam among Muslim intellectuals.
Modern Islam has been strongly influenced by the politico-religious philosophy of Abdolkarim Soroush (born 1943)[4], known primarily for his emphasis on the distinction between faith, which is internal to the human mind, and religion, a set of tenets and practices, that can be imposed. From being a key supporter of the Iranian revolution in 1979, and whilst accepting that religious concepts must be allowed to influence politics, he fell out of favour with the Iranian regime for his opposition to their making politics subservient to religion.
3. The Sharia
In other essays on this website we discussed the Sharia: its adoption as a system of control in support of the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa, its lack of Quranic justification, and its role in the growth of the political ideology of Islamism over recent years.
The treatment of women and religious minorities under the Sharia is of particular concern. As are the barbaric punishments demanded for victimless crimes, such as blasphemy and apostasy, and for sex outside marriage.
Lacking any agreed standards of evidence, Sharia trials are open to abuse, with convictions often based on the testimony of a single individual and the naïve belief that no Muslim man would lie to a Sharia court.[5]
Internationally, the Sharia has been heavily criticised as an acceptable system of law. Nevertheless, at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2009, following a point of order by the Pakistani ambassador, the Council president banned any discussion of Sharia law in the Council, a ruling that has stood ever since. But if it is not permissible in the world’s highest forum for the protection and promotion of human rights to discuss a legal system which advocates systematic abuse of those human rights, where can it be discussed?
In 1998, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban on the Turkish Welfare Party on the grounds that the introduction of the Sharia in Turkey would undermine democracy.[6] The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in resolution 2253 of 2019[7] “considers that the various Islamic declarations of human rights adopted since the 1980s, fail to reconcile Islam with human rights insofar as the Sharia is their unique source of reference.… It is therefore of great concern that Albania, Azerbaijan and Turkey … have endorsed the 1990 Cairo Declaration.”
The insistence by the Islamists that the Sharia be given special protection as the “Holy Sharia” is clearly invalid simply because there is no single agreed interpretation of Sharia law that can be considered definitive, with all five main schools of the Sharia all claiming “Holy” status. Each of these versions has been adopted as dominant in one or other regions of the Islamic world, as seen below:
The biggest problem we face however is the imposition of the Sharia by governments. As has been pointed out:[8]
“The Sharia contains religious obligations for Muslims, but they must be observed volunta[8]rily. When the government enforces Sharia rules as law, Muslims lose their freedom to choose, and since they can’t choose, they also lose the chance to be rewarded by God for making good choices. Enforcement by the government encourages hypocrisy (saying or doing one thing while believing another) and takes away freedom of belief.”
Today’s world is far removed from the desert society of the first millennium when Islam arose. Today, in most democracies, women are guaranteed equality with men and have the protection of laws based on modern ideas of justice, freedom and human rights. Every adult: man and woman, is considered autonomous with certain inalienable rights, having the protection of just and equal laws without the need for special protection or control by male family members. The world has moved on since the 9th century, but the Sharia has not.
4. Women under the Sharia
For centuries, Muslim women have been cowed into submission by the 7th century customs and practices of a desert tribe that are totally out of step with any modern understanding of human freedom and autonomy.
Throughout the history of Islam, women have been invisible: merely the bearers of children; under the control and “protection” of fathers, husband, brothers and sons; the bearers of family honour; and denied any right to personal autonomy. One will look in vain within the volumes of fatwas, interpretations, and judgements in Islamic scholarship for the name of a single woman author.
The plight of women under the Sharia is graphically illustrated in the video “Honor Diaries”[9] featuring personal testimony from nine women living under the Sharia. This factual account has, unsurprisingly, been falsely accused of being a “hate video” by Islamists and their supporters.[10]
Claimed by the Islamists to be of divine origin, the Sharia is based largely on the hadith, the reported acts and sayings of the Prophet, and frequently in direct contradiction with the message of the Quran, a message which, corrupted, distorted and sidelined over the centuries, has denied Muslim women of any semblance of dignity and autonomy.[11]
We do not need here to rehearse the absence of women’s equality with men in matters of family or civil law, nor their barbaric treatment, including death by stoning, honour killing, under-age and forced marriages, and lack or redress for rape, to be aware that nowhere in the Quran did Allah set the Prophet, nor by implication, any of his successors, in judgement over men or women.
The time has surely come for Muslim women to reclaim their God-given right to personal freedom and autonomy.
5. Conclusion
We have seen that the Sharia as a system of law developed in the earliest years of Islam for the purposes of political control in the newly conquered lands of North Africa and the Middle East, and has remained an instrument of political control ever since.
Given its lack of theological, historical, philosophical or political justification, liberal Muslims totally reject the use of the Sharia as the basis for civil or criminal law anywhere in the world.
[1] https://psipp.itb-ad.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Abdolkarim-Soroush-Reason-Freedom-and-Democracy-in-Islam_-Essential-Writings-of-Abdolkarim-Soroush-2000-2.pdf
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20081031135736/http://www.iheu.org/node/3162
[3] https://humanists.international/2008/03/islamic-law-vs-human-rights/
[4] Described by Prospect Magazine as the 7th most influential public intellectual in the world, he has suffered severe criticism from conservative opponents, most notably in his native Iran.
[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/2/21/sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemy-surviving-pakistans-death-row
[6] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/#{%22fulltext%22:[%22Turkey%20welfare%20party%22],%22documentcollectionid2%22:[%22GRANDCHAMBER%22,%22CHAMBER%22],%22itemid%22:[%22001-60936%22]}
[7] https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=25353
[8] https://www.mpvusa.org/sharia-law
[9] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Honor+Diaries&i=movies-tv-intl-ship&crid=2CY3FI2HN688W&sprefix=honor+diaries
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Diaries
[11] See, for example: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ABCs-Islamism-Everything-wanted-radical/dp/1777198623