The contested grounds of human rights in Islam and the West: A comparative study

In this thesis we explore the problem of the contested grounds of human rights in Islam and the West. While we live in an era in which human rights are at the center of our global moral discussions, human rights have been challenged for their bias in Eurocentric ethics and anthropologies. At the same time human rights were secularized in the twentieth century and divorced from their historical theological underpinnings, without being supplanted by any viable philosophical alternative. This has left modern human rights philosophically ungrounded and in need of a theory of justification. The current "crisis of human rights" has instigated new scholarship on the philosophical grounds of human rights, especially in Christian and Jewish ethics. The Islamic legal tradition is notably absent from this debate. Research on Islam and human rights almost exclusively focuses on a "narrative of conflict" and lacks a sustained engagement with classical Islamic law (fiqh) and legal philosophy (uṣūl al-fiqh). Both Orientalists and human rights lawyers have claimed Islam has no conception of human rights and is merely a "duty-based system". This thesis moves beyond the reductionism of legal Orientalism and approaches Islamic law discursively as a legal-philosophical tradition that can make worthwhile contributions to contemporary philosophical debates. Through the frameworks of comparative legal studies and conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), this thesis traces premodern human rights discourses in medieval and early modern Islam and the West. In doing so, we explore how human rights were conceptualized, justified and grounded, and how they may speak to our current moral concerns today.