Abstract
Representatives of Muslim countries actively participated in the negotiations for and subsequent formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. However, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (ratified in 1990) was an entirely divergent text. This document not only nullified those representatives’ participation in the Declaration of 1948 but also seemed to eliminate the possibility of mutual understanding between Muslim countries and the West over the problematic of human rights. It is not surprising that the Cairo Declaration is always regarded as the official response of Muslim countries to the UDHR and other United Nations covenants. In the segregated world of the two texts, each claiming to safeguard man and his rights, a number of Muslim scholars seek to step beyond this black-and-white binary by delving into Islamic sacred sources to find a reconciliation between Islam and human rights. Limiting herself to the boundaries of the Shīʿa world, in this paper, the author will study the concepts of human dignity, human rights, and its alternative, “the rights of people,” in the key texts of a number of Shīʿī scholars to see how they understand human rights from an Islamic perspective. It will be argued that the diversity of outlooks on human rights among Shīʿī scholars is indicative of the vitality of intellectual activity, which unlike the discourse of the Cairo Declaration looks to find a middle path between the texts of 1948 and 1990. However, when necessary, the author will make comparisons between Shīʿī and Sunni scholars.
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Chamankhah, L. (2019). Human Rights and Muslims. In: Woodward, M., Lukens-Bull, R. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73653-2_36-1
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