Over a billion humans in the world today are Muslims. As Muslims, they believe in human rights. But their bill of human rights is not one composed by a committee of scholars or leaders, resolved and promulgated by a government, a parliament, or a representative assembly. What humans compose can only be tentative; and what they resolve can only be temporary. With their partial knowledge and passing interests, humans are known always to contend with one another, to agree and disagree and to keep on changing. Human rights cannot be subject to such vicissitudes. Hence, Muslims believe in a bill of human rights which is eternal whose author is Allah — Subhanahu wa Ta’ala (SWT). Theirs is a bill which was taught by all the prophets and which is crystallized in the Holy Qur’an, the revelation which came to the Prophet Muhammad, Salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam (SAAS). Islam’s bill of human rights was promulgated by God for all places and times. The Islamic bill of human rights is the oldest, as well as the most perfect and greatest. The Muslims of the world rejoice that humanity has in this century come to acknowledge the greater part of Islam’s Bill of human rights and pray that Allah (SWT) may guide humankind to recognize these rights and actualize them in their lives.
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Islam and Human Rights
Why Islam?
Within Islam it is both legitimate and right to ask the question: “why Islam?” Every tenet in Islam is subject to analysis and contention. No other religion is willing to subject its basic fundamentals of faith to such questioning. For example, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most rational of Christian theologians, stopped the use of reason when it came to the basic fundamentals of Christian faith. He then tried to justify faith. So to ask “why Christianity?” is an illegitimate question. However, Allah invites the question as to “why Islam?”.
This is not the place to review the history of Christian-Muslim relations. This history may now be read in the erudite works of Norman Daniel. The reading is sad and agonizing. The conclusion which may be safely drawn from this history is that Christianity’s involvement with the Muslim World was so full of misunderstanding, prejudice, and hostility that it has warped the Western Christian’s will and consciousness. “Would to God Christianity had never met Islam!” will reverberate in the mind of any student patient enough to peruse that history. On the other side, Muslim-Christian relations have been determined by the Qur’an. Doctrinally, therefore, these relations have seen no change. Throughout their history, and despite the political hostilities, the Muslims revered Jesus as a great prophet and his faith as divine religion.
As for the Christians, the Muslims argued with them in the manner of the Qur’an. But when it came to political action, they gave them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they followed the Christianity of Jesus or of the Church. Muhammad and ‘Umar’s wager for a Christian victory over the Zoroastrians, the Meccan Muslim’s choice of, welcome and protection by Christian Abyssinia and Muhammad’s personal waiting upon the Christian Abyssinian delegates to Madinah, the Prophet’s covenant with the Christians of Najran, ‘Umar’s convenant with the Archbishop of Jerusalem and his refusal to hold prayer on the premises of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lest later Muslims might claim the place, the total cooperation of the Umawis and ‘Abbasis with their Christian subjects, and of the Umawis of Cordova with Christians who were not their subjects-all these are landmarks in a record of cooperation and mutual esteem hardly paralleled in any other history. Some persecution, some conversion under influences of all sorts, some aggression, some doctrinal attacks going beyond the limits defined by the Qur’an, there were, without a doubt. The Muslims in all places and times were not all angels! But such were scattered cases whose value falls to the ground when compared with the overwhelming spread of history which has remained true to this Qur’anic position.