Western Muslims & Human Rights – An Alternative Framework

This is Duke University

where the trade and environmental issues are still the term a boon to the Alien and Sedition accident. It's making inferential discovery Importance Of An archive, the John Hope, Franklin Center. My name is Ibrahim Musa. I'm in the department of religion at Duke University and absolutely delighted for the success of Professor Ellen McClellan his conference that we've all attended. Today, it is my privilege and an honor to introduce Professor Sherman Jackson was the Arthur F Thurnau, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Jackson's interests are diverse, with books on the relationship between the state and Islamic law and

classical Islamic texts on classical and classical notions of tolerance. And most recently, his work on Islam and the black American. His most recent book, Islam and Black Theology investigates how classical Islamic theology has been interpreted in modern America is earlier or he's trying to frame a narrative for Muslim experiences

in the in the new world, and especially through the African American experience, but also more broadly, his earlier work is on the Islamic law on he's on Islamic law in the state on the constitutional jurisprudence of Al Qaddafi, and Islam and the black American looking toward the third race resurrection was one of his first of his two major books, on Islam in America. But Jackson's articles have also reflected on the relationship between Islamic thought, pluralism and democracy. And he brings his deep knowledge of classical Islamic thought to be on the interpretation of Islam in America. And therefore, we've asked him to talk on the topic, Western Muslims and human

rights and alternative framework question, Sean Jackson.

Thank you very much, Ibrahim. And I want to thank Ellen amokachi, for inviting me here, for the opportunity, I hope to share as much in your intellectual capital, as I may be able to impart anything of value to you to sort of try and put you in a framework where my words are more rather than less likely to be understood as I mean them. Let me just make a couple of remarks up front.

I've never written on human rights, I'm just assuming that what I have written in various areas has, in some way or another suggested that I might have something remotely, perhaps maybe sort of interesting to say on the topic of human rights. Having said that much. I stand here as something of what I would consider to be an oddity in the academy, certainly in the western Academy, that is, as a practicing Muslim, who, in many ways, is not very comfortable with liberalism, certainly in the manner in which it tends to all too often inform the academic discourse in the West. But at the same time, I, I cannot bring myself to

to characterize myself as a conservative. So I'm in some ways still in search, grappling for groping for a language or a nomenclature with which to package my own intellectual identity. So that's the one thing I want to say. The second thing is that what I'm going to

explore here or express here, is really, still quite experimental. And exploratory. My point being there that these are, these ruminations are, are far, far indeed away from being any kind of last word on the on the topic of human rights. That is, if I should ever come back to speaking about that topic, again, I want you to know that these are very sort of provisional Mark remarks. And in that vein, let me just say that, I think that for me, one of the implications of the ramifications of the really miraculous things that are going on in the art world today is that in some ways, it both frees us and empowers us to think outside the box, that is to say things that we thought were

solidly within the realm of the impossible yesterday, today are not only possible, but coming into realization, and I would invite you to sort of embrace that spirit as you as you hear my remarks today.

The obvious place for a by the way, I have nowhere near the confidence of Professor nyeem. So I'm going to have to

read out my my paper, academic style.

The obvious place for a Muslim, Western or non to be

again in thinking about a topic, as quintessentially human as human rights would seem to be the Quran as the late fossil rough man so forcefully summed it up. The Quran is fundamentally a book not about God, but about man.

Of all the Quranic verses, however, that somehow managed to inundate my attempts to think about human rights. Few press their claim more relentlessly than Quran chapter two verse 275. Those who devour you serious profits and stand not those who are those who devour your serious profits stand not, except as one whom Satan has afflicted with his touch, then is because they say, sale is simply like usury. But God has permitted sale while forbidding usury. At first blush, such affiliation might appear a bit odd, if not bizarre, unless, of course, what assumes my reference to be to freedom from usery as a human right, as interesting, however, and ultimately, as we shall see, as

germane as such an argument might be, that is not the balance this verse has for me in this particular context. Rather, the operative element, is it Stark and hauntingly blunt allusion to the treachery that can attend any attempt to negotiate shared conceptual boundaries, especially across civilizational or ideological lines? And its exegesis on this verse. Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Rida laments the tendency on the part of earlier exegesis such as a property who died in the year 310 or 923 of the Common Era, to understand the distinction between sale and usury and ideological rather than natural or ontological terms. For him, that is the leader, sale among the epistemic Arabians

entailed a simple increase in value, in exchange for the transfer of an actual commodity. Riba or usury on the other hand, was an increase in price in exchange for an extension in the amount of time allowed to pay according to Leda Quran to 275. What was thus to be understood as pointing to a concrete ontological difference between sale and usury? God, God in other words, had permitted sale, but forbade usury as two ontologically and substantively unsupported, substantively distinct reality's identical and effort, identical in effect, to permitting the consumption of beef while permitting or forbidding that of pork. A property meanwhile, had taken essentially the opposite

approach for him.

Whether the increase was in the value of the commodity, or in exchange for time, there was simply no ontological difference to speak of between the two. Both were arbitrarily added values of essentially, the same generic species. That's for a taboo it could add to 275 did not identify or uncover an ontological distinction between sale and usury. It simply posited this by way of divine fear.

To quote him,

God the Exalted is essentially saying here that the increase in the case of sale is not like the increase in this in the case of usury, because I have permitted sale and I have been, I have forbade used to be the command is my command, and the creation is my creation. I judge between them as I please and the quote,

To be sure, many will detect here resonances of the classical argument between Mark Tassie lights and Asha rights over the nature of good and evil, and whether there is an antic index of moral right and wrong ontologically and not just analytically, inscribed upon creation. In more contemporary terms, however, rigor and poverty might be seen as expressing two different understandings of the relationship between truth and ideology. As a non Westerner, writing in the scientific age, and facing the threat of being dismissed, as one of shiv Visvanathan modern ancestors read as interpretation reflects a position that is hostile towards ideology, and comfortable only with

truth, for the premont and poverty on the other hand, nature or ontology, tell no truth of their own, but must ever be spoken for. This is what God does in the first instance. And what Adam does in the second, when he recalls the names that God has taught him, of all things in existence. When this understanding however, and on this understanding, however, ontologically present truth might be, it is invariably mediated through language and perception. The same truth therefore can take on multiple iterations, even if no single interpreter looks upon the views of his competitors, as being equally as valid.

palate as his own. The issue, in other words, is not always one of substance, but routinely the absence of a criterion for passing objective judgment. One might recall in this regard a tumbler his approach and his massive 30 Volume exegesis, where rather than simply assert the true or correct position, he catalogues the views of scholars near and far, only to conclude by placing his opinion in competition with these via his signature phrase, Kala Abu Jaffa, those of us who are familiar with somebody know this very well. A public also produced another less known work, disagreements among the jurists, which fell into some 3000 pages in manuscript.

Now my point in all of this is that between human rights as articulated in the dominant discourse of the West, and what I shall present as an alternative frame of human rights and Islam, there is both overlap and divergence. This makes it difficult at times to isolate ideas or characterize concepts as specifically Western or Islamic. Are the similarities and differences really there? Or are these simply posited or imposed by ideological prisms and competitive Fiat? And at what point are the differences sufficient to warrant the designation Western as opposed to Islamic? In short, how alternative does an alternative presumably, Islamic perspective on human rights have to be? Of

course, Muslims have already issued a number of human rights declarations for example, the universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, which was issued in 1981, or the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights, which came out on human rights in Islam, which came out in 1990. Much of this however, like the bulk of what Muslims writing in the West have produced, seems to consist of an often facile attempt to reconcile the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with Islam, by way of abstract Islamic moral principles, or atomistic. citations of Quran and Hadith, or provisions might be cited, with no Islamic validation at all, as for example, with article 11 of the Cairo Declaration, which

outlawed slavery without providing any proof texts or explanation. In fairness, I should say that there are Sharia provisions such as custom, or state discretion, or even the principle of blocking the means that might quite handily vindicate these approaches. But rather than repeat the strategies employed by these documents, or the efforts of scholars, who have already studied them, I shall attempt shall we say, from the perspective of a Western Muslim, to explore the possibility of a methodological alternative.

I should begin perhaps by declaring my affinity with the aforementioned perspective of authority. This, however, should not be under misunderstood.

I do not believe nor do I believe that authority believed that truth and ideology are unnecessarily doomed to antagonism as mutually exclusive perspectives on reality. After all, the fact that one is paranoid, does not prove that one is not being followed. I do believe, however, that with the exception of revealed truth for those of us who might be given to such beliefs, all claims of truth, including true ones, and tell an inevitable element ideology, or faith, perspective, biography, authoritative Fiat, or some interpretive or generative prism, and yet, ideology is not static, but ebbs and flows and dialectic syncopation with history. Thus, while the West and Islam have a lines

and antagonistic relationship today, which can render both sides susceptible to exaggerating the differences, I would insist that there was nothing necessarily permanent about this. The Prophet Muhammad, for example, initially had an antagonistic relationship with the pagan Arabians, yet, the boundary between Islam and this pre Islamic culture will ultimately soften to the point that it will become well nigh invisible.

Having said this much, there are at least to my, from my ideological perspective, differences between the dominant Western and what I shall present as an Islamic and Islamic articulation of human rights. As a precursor, however, to my attempted articulation of such, I would like to situate myself among the competing approaches to human rights in the modern Western tradition, partly to avoid the temptation to set up straw men and partly to pave the way to introduce my own approach

and her survey

of the various schools of human rights. Murray Benedictine Bohr identifies four loosely constituted approaches, the natural school, the deliberative school, the protest, school, and the discourse school. By far, the most influential of these is the natural school. In fact, most people rarely venture beyond this perspective. When thinking or talking about human rights. Natural scholars perceive human rights as naturally given one coming to possess them by the simple and indisputable fact of one's humanity. And because humanity is the basis of these entitlements, human rights are deemed to be universal, existing independent of any social, political or other recognition. One can

only deny them as such by denying the basic humanity of those who are denied.

The deliberative school views the natural school as a bit too idealistic. For them, the universality of human rights is at best a project, which will only be realized through the Global adoption of the liberal values that underwrite them. In the meantime, what actually counts as human rights is simply what societies are able to negotiate through deliberation, and agree upon. In this sense, human rights are not a natural entitlement, but an explicitly political one. They are ultimately grounded in other words, not in some transcendent realm of being, but in the concrete machinery of everyday politics. The protest, school is concerned first and foremost with issues of injustice. Like the

natural school, it sees human rights as a set of transcendent claims. Unlike the latter, however, it takes these to be a means of challenging the status quo in favor of the poor, oppressed and marginalized. In this light, it is critical of what it sees as the natural school's tendency to conflate human with rich and powerful, and from here, parlaying the suffering of the oppressed into efforts to preserve or restore the status quo. However Imperial or injurious to the oppressed this might be. At the same time, protests now as a critical of the deliberative school, suspecting the lattice over reliance on consensus building of being a slick little cover for exploitative

relationships of power.

As for the discourse school, this is the most cynical and perhaps least popular of them all. For discourse dollars, there really is no such thing as human rights, certainly not as an ontological reality. Rather, human rights is simply a powerful, seductive, and convenient language through which various interests are able to pursue their claims. However, self serving, or imperial these might be. They denounce the natural schools, universalism, and transcendence, as sheer nonsense. Indeed, Alistair McIntyre once famously proclaimed the belief in any universal notion of human rights as being one with belief in witches and unicorns. At the same time, discourse, scholars see all the

other schools or schools that singular obsession with political and civil rights as misguided and even complicit in placing abuses other than those of the state beyond critique, for example, abuses by multinational corporations, or the various social, cultural, and economic dislocations wrought by globalization. Yet while rejecting the transcendent claims of the protest, school discourse, scholars share the latest concern for the oppressed for them, however, human rights, even in the service of the oppressed, is not an ontological reality, but merely an ideological tool.

Now my own thinking,

or my own position, at least at this point, in my thinking, fall somewhere and an annoyingly eclectic space between these schools. This is not entirely a result of an inability on my part to make up my mind on core issues. Rather, the tendency in human rights discourses, at least in my mind, seems to place everything that might be identified as a human right on the same plane, and this seems to me to be rather misguided. I agree that freedom from genocide, torture, rape, murder, unlawful confiscation, detention, and the like, can be reasonably defended as human rights. I do not believe, however, that freedom from hijab or polygyny, or Sharia in general is a human right. Nor do

I believe that equality in all of its iterations is a human right. Nor do I believe that even freedom from racism is a human right. Moreover, to the extent that I would characterize it

You have these ladder as human rights, I would not place them on the same plane or defend them with the same urgency as I would genocide, torture, rape and the like,

at bottom. With regard to what I have presented here as these first tier or primary rights, I am inclined to agree with the natural and protest schools. I'm hesitant to join them, however, in their attributions of universality, and transcendence to these rights. For me, the problem with the natural school and the protest school is that the universalism is based on ideological projection, what I have termed elsewhere false universals to use the depiction of the famed because le.

They look upon their own personal or group interests, as if these represented the interests of the entire world. This should not be understood as a denial of the possibility

of universal values. But to me, all projections, including Islamic projections, result in false universals. True universals, on the other hand, are canvassed. And they are the result of consensus. Thus, to the extent that what I have termed first tier or primary rights are recognized as universal. I would say that they come only that they could only be right that I would say that they could only rightfully gain this recognition, along the lines advocated or recognized by the deliberative school, that is through negotiation and the generation of consensus. Indeed, I suspect that it is the lack of dissent, more than any positive affirmation of universality that holds these

primary rights in place today.

You

it is one we come to the functional distinction between primary and secondary rights, however, that an alternative framing may be most relevant. Of course, primary and secondary is my own division, and it is not without problems of its own. On the one hand, I am unaware of any Western human rights scheme that formally recognizes such a dichotomy. Though it seems clear that polygyny, for example as a human rights violation is not the same as genocide. On the other hand, upon close examination, it is with the secondary rights that we begin to detect, at least in my mind, as certain teleological pretension of the human rights discourse as a whole. In other words, secondary rights

often constitute the final aims of human rights discourse, and in this capacity are actually served by the primary rights. In this sense, they are secondary, only accidentally, and in theory, and actual practice. They are primary to state the latter and Islamic terms, secondary rights often constitute the posit or broader aims of the Western human rights scheme. And just as in Islamic legal theory, no individual law, no matter how explicitly laid out in the sources it might be, is to be applied in instances where its application stands to obliterate one of the broader aims of the Shediac. Primary human rights may take a backseat, where their pursuit threatens the unspoken,

broader interest of the human rights discourse. Let me try here to give a brief example of what I'm talking about.

Western critiques of Islamic,

of Islamic schemes of human rights, or more precisely of Sharia tend to focus on two main topics, women and non Muslims, both of whom are identified as victims of inequality. To my mind, the problem with non Muslims is more a function of the homogenizing tendencies of the ability legally monistic structure of the nation state than it is to any specific provisions of Sharia. In fact, the universal Islamic Declaration on Human Rights states explicitly in article 10, that non Muslims have the right to exempt them from Sharia and to present their civil and family law disputes to their own tribunals. Of course, the same would not apply to women as a class as the bulk of these would

obviously, in a Muslim society be Muslims. Now, in one of his essays, a major proponent of human rights in a Muslim context, identifies polygyny as a violation of human rights and as much as it discriminates against women. Discrimination here is instantiated by the unequal treatment of women explained by what is referred to as reciprocity that is the principle that x should treat y in the same way that X would like to be treated by y. On this filiation should he stands in need of reinterpretation in all

wanted to ban polygyny, and thus bring it into conformity with the principle of equality. Yet it would seem to me that we're equality, clearly a primary right in the western scheme. Really the aim of this critique, allowing polyandry would be just as effective and option as wood banning polygyny. But this is never contemplated, despite the fact that allowing polyandry would carry the additional advantage of promoting greater freedom, itself also a primary right. Rather, the ban on polygyny appears to take precedence as the true aim of pressing the principle of equality. And even the more perfect equality not to mention freedom that would obtain by allowing polyandry is sacrificed to the

desire to ban polygyny. Of course, whether you believe this or not.

The issue here is not polygyny, or polyandry. But the tendency in human rights discourses to conceal while pursuing interests and outcomes that lie beyond its stated objectives. Perhaps few have been more eloquent, certainly among those writing of the West, and insisting that human rights discourses conceal a hidden agenda than the human rights attorney and activist, Macao Matoba

and his book human rights, a political and cultural critique. He refers explicitly to the holy trinity of liberalism, democracy and human rights. He insists that the human rights corpus is essentially a philosophy promoting the diffusion and primacy of liberalism around the globe. Liberalism, moreover, is not an abstract, neutral, or on storage enterprise, it is emphatically European. And by extension, we might add American, according to Matua, the evangelical zeal with which it is promoted alongside the depths of the denials of its role as one of the broader aims of the human rights discourse, and I quote here, leaves humanity stuck at the door of liberalism,

unable to go forward or imagine a post liberal society. To be sure, liberalism is an amorphous term, both denoting and condoning many things to many people.

I do not think it would be a mystery and misrepresented a misrepresentation of things, however, to say, as does human rights advocate, Sally, Mary, that and I quote, human rights are part of a distinctive, modernist vision of the good and just society that emphasizes autonomy, choice, equality, secularism and protection of the body. Again, their pretensions to transcendence and universalism, notwithstanding, these values are quite storied and often pressed to teleological ends. This may not always be the case, but it is routinely so especially when it comes to Muslim majority policies. In her book, toleration as recognition, Anna Galliano it identifies two liberal

approaches, the neutralist and the perfectionist, neutralise see the liberal order as a hospitable empty box, in which any culture, tradition, way of life, a worldview is welcome to pursue its dream. Pluralism according to this vision, both in the sense of allowing competing visions and suspending judgment on their relative rightness is a primary value. As such, proponents of a liberal order, including the state have no right to engage in any attempt to produce better citizens. perfectionists, on the other hand, see liberalism as entailing a distinct and concrete moral outlook, which must be actively defended, and boldly promoted. Pluralism on this understanding is a

secondary, if not tertiary value, and those whose way of life clashes with the fundamental values of freedom, autonomy, and self development may be either tolerated if it proves useless or counterproductive to repress them or coerced if it seems feasible to, to force them to comply, or if they appear to pose an imminent threat to the liberal order. Hijab for example, that is the headscarf.

According to perfectionists, while causing no harm and itself must be combated because it implies women's subordination and invisibility, which makes it incompatible with liberal ideals could have redacted me on the other hand, must not be tolerated because it is harmful. In some perfectionist liberals take a direct interest in producing better citizens in which capacity they may deem it necessary to force people to become autonomous, secular, individualistic beings in accordance in accordance with concrete visions of the liberal good.

Good.

Perfectionist liberalism is the form in which human rights at least in my mind, seems to have been seems to have come or have been pitched to most Muslim communities. It does not take much to see of course, that autonomy, equality, protection of the body freedom and the like, are all concretized in accordance with views, histories, and sensibilities and tirely exterior to these values themselves. Otherwise, there is no reason why hijab for, for example, would not be consistent with every one of the Affer mentioned values, including autonomy, choice, secularism, and protection of the body, as well as freedom development and equality. You could have adopted me on the other hand, given our

including my own cultural biases and sensibilities, as a practice, much like euthanasia that I along with many others, many of us in this room would strongly object to, and very strongly encourage others to object to whether or not however, especially when compared to how we treat, say prostitution or euthanasia. It is consistent with autonomy, equality, secularism, protecting the body of the light, seems to me to be an entirely different matter. And it seems to me, the only way to argue that it is inconsistent with these values would be through the language of human rights, not the substance of its values.

What then, would be the alternative, presumably Islamic framework for human rights?

I shall take as my point of departure, some ruminations. And by the way, let me say this, I mean, this is an arbitrary point of departure. Are we talking 1400 years of Islamic intellectual history, there are literally 1000s of points of departure that one could imagine. I'm going to take a particular one. I shall take as my point of departure, some ruminations of a very old friend of mine, the seventh 13th century Maliki jurist of Cairo, she have Adina Rafi, and his famous work on legal precepts. Al Farooq elecraft takes up the matter of the relationship or more properly, the distinction between the rights of God and the rights of humans, for kukula

versus Fukuoka, Adam, again, quite counter intuitively. Elka Rafi identifies the rights of humans, not with what they are entitled to claim, but with what they have a right to forfeit, as he put it,

have an Arabic here everything that a human has the right to forfeit. That is what we mean by a right of human. This stands in contrast, according to him with the rights of God, which are essentially human entitlements, that we do not have a right to forfeit, as he put it, everything that a human does not have the right to forfeit, that is what we mean by a right of God. To be sure, the ultimate ground of all of these rights is divine dispensation, which position surely ought to play a determinative role and determining their substance.

We should note, however, that what may be understood as human rights are not limited to what l Qaddafi identifies as to who could be bad or the rights of humans. Rather, the rights of God are also essentially human rights, the difference between the two being simply that the latter are inalienable, while the former or not, to distinguish between the two are cut off, besides the fact that humans have an inalienable right to be free of exploitation via usury. Thus, even if they agreed to such, this would not be something that they will be allowed to do. On the other hand, humans have a right to be represented by outright witnesses in court. But they may choose to forfeit

this right, and accept the testimony of scoundrels on their behalf. And I was reminded of this this morning. They may, for example, forgive pardon, someone who's murdered a member of their family. That's what he identifies as coming under a regime of human rights

on their face. Such examples would seem to be of little use in developing a modern human rights scheme. But this may have more to do with the incumbency and accumulated weight of the dominant order, which makes it difficult to extricate ourselves from the tendency to view everything else through a prism destined to regulate relegate the ladder to inferior status. What I would like to do and the little time that I have left is indulge Al Qaddafi a bit more imaginatively to see what advantages and disadvantages his woman nations might hold for

The modern Muslim scheme of human rights

at bottom

Oh cut off is so kukula or rights of God, I guess I'll use the English because everybody here might not know the Arabic at bottom l krawitz. Rights of God are essentially primary human rights, while the rights of humans are secondary rights. When we look more broadly at Islamic juristic writings, however, we find that among the concerns, most consistently included under the designation, rights of God is the sanctity of the public space. This space traditionally understood to be occupied by Muslims and non Muslims alike, is unanimously depicted as absolutely inviolable. On our current office definition, then it would never be the right of any group or individual to compromise or

threaten the sanctity of the public space. Now as the very value of the public space, was the inextricable role it played in enabling humans to sustain their livelihoods and necessary human relations. This provision could easily be seen as covering such primary values as freedom from genocide, torture, rape, murder, unlawful conference, confiscation, detention, and the like. Beyond this, however, these is the essential aspects not only of religious belief, but also of religious practice that is, Muslim and non Muslim alike, could be easily accommodated, as a right of God understood again, as the freedom of the public space from violence, terror and unwarranted

molestation.

Two things require attention here. First, protection of non Muslims primary human rights is not grounded in the principle of equality, nor and that of universality per se, but in that of the sanctity of the public space. Second, and this is related to the first point, there is nothing that requires the public space to be legally or religiously, homogenized or monistic. On the contrary, it is understood in explicit terms to be pluralistic. This not only qualifies the meaning of Sharia,

as the ultimate source of the rights of God as well as the rights of humans, but suggest ways in which equality might be an inferior principle in which to ground such primary rights. For if the aim is simply to make non Muslims equal to Muslims, it is difficult to imagine how they might come to enjoy any rights, privileges or exemptions, other than those enjoyed by Muslims, even if this leads to their being denied the right to practice things that their religion permits.

The second advantage that I see possibly in this game relates to its provision of a more substantive scheme of rights as elk Rafi points out among the rights of God are such things as freedom from exploitation, from usury.

To my mind, this can be read as a civic Dokic civic Dokic reference, not only to the various ravages wrought by modern capitalism, but to the notion that human rights concerns can be extended beyond an exclusive emphasis on the specifically political abuses of the state. In other words, on cut off his scheme, the abuses of multinational corporations, or even local monopolies and vested interests, might be more easily drawn into human rights, concerns and sensibilities. For it does not matter in his scheme, who violates a right of God, rights of God are inviolable period. Of course, the fact that this right like all other rights of God is grounded in the Sharia might raise issues about the

extent to which non Muslims would come under this protection. But it seems to me that, in fact, the most of this will do is convert these protections from primary to secondary rights, in which capacity non Muslims would have a right to forfeit this protection, but Muslims will not have the right to impose this forfeiture upon them.

The third and final advantage are these possible advantages of karate scheme relates to the teleological relationship between his primary and secondary rights.

I must admit here that my thinking at this point is still a bit fuzzy.

What I think I want to say, at least for the time being, is that I suspect iconography scheme of being less teleological and thus less hegemonic than the dominant scheme of human rights in the West.

As is known, Islamic law recognizes an explicit regime of broader aims and objectives known as the mocassin. In this week, in this regard, Islam might be seen as no less teleological than the dominant scheme of human rights in the West. There was another sense, however, in which Islam still young teleological for us, neither undermines nor drives it to be genes of rights, while the very question of what is the right of God, and what is the right of human is informed by the interpretive contributions of the broader aims and objectives of the Shetty ah, these rights are concrete and specific, not open ended principles easily filled with ideologically driven aspirations.

In this capacity, once they have been arrived at they are not easily placed in the service of broader visions of the good society, where rights of God and rights of humans are violated or denied. The aim is simply to restore them, even if people may choose forfeiture over restoration in the case of rights of humans, but there is no question of secondary rights, providing the teleological thrust or vision for the instantiation of primary rights, as mature and the Disco School argue to be the case with a Western scheme of human rights. It is true, of course, that Islam has an interest in producing better citizens. The difference, however, at least I would argue, is

that it does not seek to do this through a regime of rights in this way Islamic human rights. So certainly l Qaddafi scheme would seem to be less hegemonic than the Western scheme of human rights.

Let me now turn to two possible disadvantages of Al Qaddafi scheme. The first is quite substantive, and this is the issue of slavery. In practical terms, the growing global consensus against slavery clearly encompasses Muslims.

As mentioned, the Declaration of Human Rights and Islam explicitly outlawed it. In more grounded theoretical terms, however, that is, as an explicitly legal right, the Western system would seem to be more effective, a more effective means of placing slavery beyond consideration. Humans quite humans simply have a right under any and all circumstances to be free of slavery. Of course, this to is a story difference, the Western tradition and experience of slavery being quite different from that of a slams. Still,

the way to place in this higher wall around slavery under any and all circumstances, including war, requires, I think, a bit more shoddy grounding, and grounding that I'll cut off the system, at least at this point, does not appear to provide. After all, slavery is quintessentially an institution at war, at least, or institution of war, at least according to Islam. And one can only imagine how differently the public space might be conceived as operating in times of war, as compared to times of peace.

The second disadvantage relates to scope, specifically, Islam's ability or readiness to extend its moral vision beyond the boundaries of deliberative global consensus. For Al Qaddafi, the ultimate determinant of the concrete rights of humans is clearly the Shediac.

At the same time, humans are the humans he contemplates, are primarily Muslims. Even non Muslims who come under the jurisdiction of Sharia are understood to enjoy rights that may contradict the moral vision of Islam. Perhaps the most glaring example of this being the Zoroastrian institution of self marriage. This example I've talked about before, where the Zoroastrian priests permitted

men to marry the mothers or their daughters of the sisters. And this is brought to the Muslim jurists, and they say, Well, if they don't seek our education, we don't do anything. If they do cigar adjudication, we judge them according to Zoroastrian law, and not to not according to Sharia.

So while modern history and its ever expanding, deliberative consensus has gone a long way and enshrining the bulk of what I have been referring to as primary human rights, there remains a sense in which Islam at least a little cut off his scheme would hesitate to second guessed the concrete schemes of rights upheld by non Muslims in their autonomous, independent non Muslim jurisdictions, here to then the Western system will be far less encumbered and addressing human rights in and non western jurisdictions through such universal values as freedom or equality. Of course, it might be argued, on the other hand, that in taking a more hands off approach to non Muslim jurisdictions,

Islam is effectively mimicking the way that the rest of the world habitually treats the United States and the West

Just in general, Western countries today are generally not held to have human rights issues. They only have civil rights issues, which reflects the extent to which their regimes of rights are accepted as both self validating and self corrective. We know for example, how vehemently and summarily dismissed Malcolm X was when he tried to cast the plight of black Americans as a human rights issue.

I would like to conclude here having perhaps push your patients to limit what were they we iterative remark regarding the limitations, not only of the human rights discourse, but of the rights discourse overall, I mentioned earlier that I did not think that freedom from racism for example, was a human right. By this, I meant that I did not believe it to be anyone's guaranteed right that is by mere dint of being human, that they not be looked upon with contempt or,

or not be looked down upon, based on the color of their skin, or the ethnic genealogy. What I did not mean, however, was that racism, or predatory ethnocentrism were good or morally defensible. In fact, my beliefs are quite the opposite. But the way to deal with these diseases is not simply through legal prescriptions and sanctions. And we might remind ourselves that law is the primary and Premier most favorite mechanism through which human rights advocates routinely operate. Rather, racism and such ills belongs to the province of what McIntyre and others including myself, would refer to as the virtues. And what Muslim says is Alka Rafi would have known as a clock, it is

ultimately in other words, our hidden, pre rational, even pre conscious selves that must be addressed and properly animated, if these effects of these defects are to be effectively addressed. And this I am afraid is something the non reflexive rationalism of the Human Rights discourses simply cannot do. Which brings me back oddly.

To Quran chapter two, verse 275. The virtues or o'clock are not simply important as a theoretical alternative to human rights. Their absence is actually the reason that we get so many human rights violations in the first place. While all the lofty declarations Muslim and non Muslim alike remain an all too many instances. I know ink on paper. In his book, saviors and survivors door for politics and the war on terror. Mahmood Mamdani points to the often feigned or contrived ambiguity between such constructs as official census categories, and racism, intervention and invasion. The tragedies in Iraq, Afghanistan, on the one hand, and what is going on and off war on the other, the latter

being commonly accepted as a human rights concern, the former commonly not, in the end, no amount of the kind of rationalistic jousting, promoted by human rights discourses, Western or Islamic will resolve these ambiguities, rather like the pre Islamic Arabians, each side will continue to point to ontological differences that allegedly sustain its case. This is to me the ultimate import of Quran to 275 for this verse makes it clear that in the end, it may be only the virtues and the o'clock of piety and it had to anonymous commitment to obedience to the commandments of God, not any ontologically obvious distinctions that will enable us to see at least in many cases, the difference

between a parent an actual good and evil Thank you very much.

Yeah.

Jackson says, he said he didn't think about this a great deal.

I'm not sure about that. I thought a great deal about it. i There are two questions you can see that you

can do whatever you say. I see Ali and I see him Hambleton. Go, thank you for yourself. I wanted to ask you, I wanted to ask you.

This thing is not on.

I wanted to ask you, how does justice figure into your account of Qadhafi and I, what I could sense it was that you were hesitant to embrace the concept and the practice of equality.

Perhaps because of its connections with measurability, determinism, a reciprocity of kind

calculability of relationality. So I wanted to ask you, if it's not equality, then how do you interpret justice, good injustice, the the normative emphasis on justice? Couldn't that be reconfigured into some form of equality?

Well, I think that in general, the problem that I have with both of these constructs is that as abstract categories, they're both fine. I don't think that I mean, I don't think that you'll find anybody

who's against justice. And even I, in my talk, I said, I'm against equality in all of its iterations. The problem is that equality and justice, they all have to be concretized. And once they are concretize, they become storied constructs. They have a beginning in history, they have a an existence in history. They involve competing parties, both in terms of who's on, I mean, who's treating whom, who's the subject and the object of this equality or this justice. All right. And so we get into the problem of how to concretize these values, not whether or not justice is, is is a value that we recognize. So I'm not against justice as as as a value, but I'm against my concretion

of justice, parading as universal justice. And I'm also against your concrete, or concretion, of equality, parading as universal equality. The example that comes to mind is

what's his name up at Yale? Law school? Yes, Stephen Carter,

has an interesting little report in his book God's name in vain. He says that

he was once told by a Christian chaplain, working in one of the prisons, that these Muslim inmates have no right to complain about anything, because they enjoy all of the rights that Christians enjoy.

And what God has said, is that, well, no doubt they do. But if I were a Muslim, I will want to have the rights that I need to live a dignified existence as a Muslim, not simply the rights that Christians have to live as Christians. So that's an example of a concretion of, of equality that's raised to the level of an abstract universal category. That's the problem that I have.

I'm not against equality as I'm not against justice.

So So who's justice? Whose equality?

I really like you know, you did?

I did. But you know, I'm going to give you a difficult question here.

It seems to me that, I mean, there are a lot of things to your talk raises, but I'm gonna try to focus on one of them.

I think despite your attempt to distinguish your scheme, from a naturalist scheme, it's an it's equivalent to a naturalist scheme insofar as whatever is in alienable, right and a non alienable, right is posited, as metaphysically true as a metaphysically, true conception, whether that's from God or nature, or whatever. So it's, it's, it's conceptually akin to a naturalistic view of rights. So I want to press you, there are certain advantages to that, and certain disadvantages. So that's why I press you on the disadvantages of that view. Because you could take human rights as a project of governance, rather than as a project of ontology. So the purpose is not so much to discover a

sort of true ontology of human beings, but rather, how do you solve the problem of human beings living together in as a problem of mutual governance. And I think this is the thing that I guess the, I guess I will the way I would critique the cut off in conception of the *tier, there is no rule for there's no role for human governance

in the way you present it so that especially in his clearest in the case of non Muslims, so rights are generated, and then they're given to non Muslims on a take it or leave it basis. Now, of course, we'd say they're perfectly decent rights, they have a perfectly decent set of rights that entails for them to flourish etcetera, etcetera, but they have no role in the generation of the rights themselves. And so I think one could say that at least from perspective of human rights as a, as a governance project, the biggest source of tension is that the human rights as a governance project looks as the ultimate inalienable right that human beings have is to govern themselves and in your

decision

option of this Islamic human rights scheme or this cut off Ian scheme, there is no role for human self governance. Right. And so just curious what you think about that? Well,

I mean, you meant to raise difficult question, and in some ways you did and other ways, perhaps, you, you missed a certain subtlety that I was trying to get at, with regard to the first part of your question

I don't think that'll cut off is, especially national currencies is is a natural scheme. Because

in some ways, what he's saying in some ways, what he thought he and others are saying is that ontology does not tell the whole story. Even if you are unequal to me, you're less intelligent, you're less, I don't know, wealthy, less, whatever. All right, I still have an obligation to treat you in a certain way. All right. And that's not dictated by the ontological relationship between us. There's something beyond ontology. So then I'm looking for natural schemes of rights. They accept, all right, a transcendent realm, a transcendent realm of rights. Now, it's not the same as the naturalist realm, because it's not ontologically grounded. And it's not universal in the sense that,

that you mean universal with regard to governance, I'm not so sure I would fully agree with you. And I would I would take, or I would offer to

ideas for consideration. The first is that when we think of issues of governance, we tend to think, again, in terms of the legally monistic nation state. That is certainly not what Elka Rafi has in mind. And as I tried to allude to, with example of the self marriage, we don't generate their rights in terms of who can marry whom. And they could change that tomorrow. We have nothing to do with that, at least according to karate. So if the Zoroastrian community decides tomorrow, that gay marriage is is fine, what else Qaddafi is saying is that we don't have anything to do with that. All right, because we do not presuppose a single regime of rights that runs equally across the board

covering all communities in the same way. Let me finish. All right.

That's on the one hand, on the other hand, I think that we need to be a bit more attentive to the reality of limitations and the scope of Islamic law. I think that the tendency is to think that, you know,

well, let me put it this way. If

FoxNews, and Newt Gingrich and all these people want to be right, let's say, and karate would come and take over America tomorrow, write

a good book of American law was exactly the same, the same as what it is traffic laws,

zoning laws, licensing, medical doctors, I mean, all kinds of things, all right, that are outside of the scope of sort of concretely religious law. All right. And even people like Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, and others have said explicitly, there's no reason why non Muslims can't participate in and those kinds of regulations, no reason at all. So the idea that, you know, karate scheme would completely

ban non Muslims from participation in what kind of society we have, I don't see that and especially for karate, because of, of the pre modern jurists, he is very explicit in pointing out the limits of Islamic law.

There's no such thing as an Islamic speed limit.

I mean, he would be explicit about that. There's no such thing as you know, Islamic zoning laws.

Right. So so I'm not so sure I would, I would subscribe to the notion that they have no

role in, in self governments or in generating the rules that we live by.

Well,

one of the one of the tests I've been having, I was given by Elon was to also just to stimulate or raise some some questions. Some some respondents prefer not to do that. And just to give you a little bit of a break,

I was Muhammad, did you have a follow up question?

Okay, okay, so

I thought he didn't help me out here. So I was gonna

show him and I was gonna like wondering, in terms of the the schema, let's let's bring a corollary to America, as you said, right, and we bring, so what are the kinds of things that he's going to change?

And you talked about the idea

Have the public's public space. And I like the idea that you talked about the public space of not being homogenized one, you said pluralistic space.

But then I am wondering, you know, whether you thinking about the space in a kind of a one way that someone like, like no bank would talk about it as a kind of a complex space, right. But I'm wondering where the when you talk about the Caribbean style is where there's a hierarchical public space, where certain things will be go according to certain kind of ontological categories. And I'm wondering

that,

in this in this particular context, how such a set or imaginary of ontological

space or an ontological ontologically based right, would work in a political space like ours. In other words, what you would then require is that you have to undo and remake many of the parameters the nation state right to make this possible to make Qaddafi work, or would it not require unmaking or re doing that? So that's, that's a set of it's a thought that comes to mind as to how karate will work in the kind of space we have out here. I know yours is a kind of a, a think you're thinking through his issue. You are positing some some questions, but I'm thinking of it, that if we bring him here,

what will what will change? And the and the question that comes to mind, were as you were speaking, so let's make it take it more concrete and take karate to Oklahoma. Right? Where they got this, Sharia restriction and ban know nothing about Sharia would go through any legislature, or courts cannot entertain that.

To what extent would would this create a a way in which it allows, for instance,

someone who believe that Muslims are antithetical to their very existence, right? So there are certain categories and groups of people in the United States who believe that Muslims and the ideology and the beliefs are completely antithetical How does one negotiate those kinds of antinomies

in in a in a Caribbean model, because one of the things i i find that while you are making very strong accents, but have a strong accent on difference, and ons and your hierarchy, rather, your category of primary and secondary rights, and the way you justify those, and wondering how one arbitrates those, and if you have thought about that, in that in that context, the other set of issues that are

okay, okay, let me just just throw one more, one more thing up.

And that is, one of the things that we haven't talked about

thus far, is the idea that, that we make it a choice between liberal rights and other kinds of genealogies of rights. And I've seen, for instance, political models that have hybrids, the example is South Africa.

So in South Africa, you have a set of kind of liberal freedoms, and guaranteed constitutionally, but also a set of entitlements, right? The right to labor to organize the right to housing, the right to water, all kinds of other kinds of entitlements that citizens require. And that is also inspired out of the, of the kinds of socialist struggle that was behind the ANC at one stage. And also the idea that socialist bloc, challenged the bourgeois rights and said, What about political economic rights as vital rights? So I'm wondering that as a set of kind of meditations and reflections that your talk had sparked in me, and finally, the third, the third, the third reflection, I know you can

handle this. Is that is that is that is that the question of you when you when you move with karate from for Coke? And yeah, I'm going to be for logically kind of challenging you and asking, from her cook as Coca Cola, hopefully bad, that you translate it as rights. Would you not give any attention to the question of Huck meaning as certain kinds of duties that result in reciprocal claims, as the early scholars used it? I mean, one of the critical criticism I have with people like Rational minutiae, or the people of the Universal Declaration of Islamic rights, and all those people is the slippage from the medieval and classical Islamic categories of heart and quick translation into

liberal bourgeois rights. And I think those are very different kinds of things. And I don't want to accuse you of the same thing. I'm just asking, how do you how do you make that how do you do the translation presets?

have to help me out and remembering all of these things. Let me let me try

and begin with the last. The last thing first.

I, I, I hear what you're saying in terms of this translation of Hawk as as as rights and ignoring what many. And by the way, I would not consider it to be many of the early scholars who recognize this sort of reciprocal relationship between

entitlements and duties claims, their claims and duties. And there are any number of claims that have no reasonable obligation to them at all. All right. So in that sense, a hawk is a right, right.

I have a woman has the hawk to dispose of her property, she didn't have any that's not predicated upon any kind of reciprocal obligation that she may have There are any number of of rights or claims that say that that are not there are not reciprocal. So I would agree that, while not all,

all right,

are such that they do not entail reciprocal or our presumption of some kind of reciprocal engagement? Not all HOOQ work like that. There are Hokku that work like that. So I would argue that this translation is not totally bogus, and that there is something to be invested in and looking at it like this. Which brings me to my second comment, look, coffee died in 1285. I mean, we're in 2011. Now. I mean, this is an enormous a gargantuan

enterprise of translation, Ibrahim, all right. And I don't advocate that, you know, karate has set out some kind of cookie cutter blueprint that can simply be, you know, slapped down on on America, not not not by far. In fact,

anyone who's written a read any, anything that I'm very much opposed to that to that very move, that that's, that's a ridiculous move, as far as I'm concerned, it completely be the historicize is,

and in a way that we attribute that distorts the stylization, to people like a karate, who was well aware of his existence in a particular historical moment, and never said that, well, I'm writing for Sherman Jackson, you know,

you know, in 2011 do. So I think that there are any number of radical adjustments that would have to be that would have to be made. I think that what

brought me to thinking about this particular topic in this particular way, was the sort of assignment that I was understood to sort of get from Ellen.

And the fact that I think that Muslims often get stuck. And I think Abdullah, who was talking about this, to some extent, get stuck in this notion that, you know, the notion of humans having rights

is a completely Western phenomenon that has no justification at all in Islam. And I wanted to simply investigate that a bit. All right. Now, with regard to the public space, a hierarchical public space, I think it would be naive to assume that karate or any other human being, as Abdullah said, Are you like agreeing with him to lay here? Yeah, that's right. So

that any other human being would would come into human space, and want to say that, you know, any advantage and power that I enjoy, I want to just give up, I don't want any advantage of power. I don't think that karate would say that. And I think that to the extent that he could maintain a certain advantage, as with the rest of us, he would try to do that, in terms of the hierarchy, however. So they wouldn't be I mean, a hierarchical public space in that regard. But I think in another another way, the public space becomes hierarchical, in as much as we prioritize the different rights that are being distributed.

It's in other words

you if I want different rights from the ones that you have, all right, you get yours. I get mine. who's up and who's down? Where's where's the hierarchy there?

All right, it's usually when I want a right, the same write that you want. You get it, I don't get it that results and hierarchy. So I think that we're looking at a slightly different kind of a public space with a with a cut off and

And again,

man, I'm delighted this is scary.

Because Because because there's a real extent to which, again, he's living in a time where he does not see the state as being invested with either the right or the duty, I mean to to promote any kind of vision of this, as opposed to that kind of citizen. So he's very much at home with allowing substitute communities to negotiate that public space. And the state being there more. So to keep order now. And Islamic orders is where I have different from afterlife and Islamic order. But with far more a sort of sort of distance, then we would assume, based on the role that the nation state plays today was one of the questions you had I don't remember it now. Yeah. Well, that was about

economic and political rights. And, and as not just a hybrid system. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not I'm not against the sub, the substance of all liberal rights, quite liberal rights, I guess what, what I have, you know, some difficulty with is again, that, you know, the tendency to speak in

abstract universal terms on the one hand, and then present these rights and very storied, concretize ways on on the other. That's one thing and I think the other is, and I do have some sympathy with cut off in this regard, he would be looking at a much more sort of communitarian. communitarian type,

a public space, in which the, the liberal demand in which the man in which rights or or entitlements are, are validated and justify,

basically denies a group's the right to, and does their own story to say, Okay, we will negotiate this, but, you know, we will not negotiate this because this is simply too essential to our being, as whoever we are.

Yeah, I see several hands. One two,

related question that was asked previously. I think that regardless of what the actual source of what constitutes human rights, there are a lot of human rights that we sort of naturally believe, without taking the title of naturally for naturalism. What's in your opinion, and I have very little knowledge of Islam is actually the active rule of individual societies, the World Organization, in actually promoting at least the basic human rights that we have no argument about and whatsoever? Well, again, as I said, for Qaddafi, the basic human rights are inalienable. So we have a communal obligation to keep them in place. And that when they're when they're when they're violated, we don't

have a right to simply say that, well, no, they are part of the rights of God. All right. And so they have to be defended as such.

So it's not as it's not as if the community has no role. And, and preserving and preserving rights. But across communal lines, especially when it comes to what I refer to as a secondary rights. You know, there's not this business of, you know, we're going to make you guys all polygynous, because we really think that's a good idea.

That's what I was trying to get at

this man.

Hi, I'm actually kind of curious. So with your definition of rights, and like Islamic law, and how especially your description of the Qaddafi school, I was just thinking in terms of like Muslim community as being highly heterogeneous rather than being constitutive of one particular school of thought. So and you also were alluding to like the rights of God. So, in view of what Abdullah he say that translation is also like a form of interpretation, how would we therefore know like a law and Islamic law therefore, that is being constructed here

is representative of the diversity within the Muslim thought especially since if this particular act is like codify in the law or this Sharia law of the country?

And how would that therefore, one, this I mean, one decide what is constitutive of a primary set of primary primaries versus secondaries and which How do you know which are like the rights of God? Because each different schools of thought may have different interpretation of the very same issue itself? Well, I mean, basically, I think that

I hear I think in terms of the nature of Islamic law.

And here I would I would disagree with Abdullah here. And that is that

not everything in Islamic law is of the same degree of

hunger. But there's there are there are issues in Islamic law on once there is unanimous consensus. Now whether that consensus is, is hermetically validatable or not. The general going understanding is that there are things on which there is a unanimous consensus. All right, and very little wrangling around what that unanimous consensus is on these sort of core core values. Beyond that, you're right. Mannequins will claim this, some mannequins will claim that Hana fees will claim something else, and part of what our job would be under those circumstances, is to come up with a framework for how we negotiate these competing notions of what chutiya stands for. And this is

exactly what I'll put off he did. In his own life, he happened to be a member of a minority school, in a state that

sort of

elevated or privilege that another school. And so what he had to do was fight for his right to maintain his own understanding,

a corporate understanding his own individual understanding, understanding of his school as a valid way of going about living a dignified Islamic life. So what we're talking about here is what the framework we would have a to do that, but I don't see how this is any different from what we have in any other legal system. I mean, we talk about Islamic law as if, well, Muslims have all kinds of ideas and all kinds of things, constitutional lawyers, and have all kinds of ideas on all kinds of things. Judges don't have different opinions. Supreme Court judges don't have a different opinions. American law doesn't change from one era to another. So the problem of diversity and indeterminacy.

That's a human problem that we have to come up with ways of managing, I don't see where Islamic law is any different in that regard.

Oh, it is it's different in degree and that kind?

Yeah, yeah.

I don't see any hands.

Okay, so I get I get to ask my follow up.

A couple, just a couple of things.

I guess I need to be clear on what I mean by self governance and collective self governance, because it's true, obviously, as a historical matter, that Islamic law created space for non Muslim communities to practically govern themselves. But it was Islamic law that determined those boundaries. That's your opinion.

Let me just finish. It was this the standards of the Folk Aha, that determined where Islamic law applied and where it didn't apply?

And so what I mean by self governance, is that each person or what I guess what standard liberal theory means is that each citizen has an equal claim on making the rules that govern everybody together. And I think, and that's fine. I mean, you can I think it's perfectly possible to defend that model. But I'm just saying that it's absent in that, as we were just talking about actually this issue of indeterminacy. You know, it's a different kind of indeterminacy. Because it's a it's a, it's a, essentially a theological indeterminacy. Because we don't know what the proper rule that God wants is. And so as long as we're stuck to interpretive methods of rule finding, we can't

resolve it. But the liberal answer is, we have a political process that we make the rule collectively through this representative policy representative institutions, the result that comes out is the rule that applies to everybody. And so this is what I think is is I think, really the heart of the dissonance. Is that is that in sort of the liberal conception of human rights sort of the in the most fundamental, right, for which everything else comes out of is that it's, you have no power to dispose of your right to govern yourself. Whereas in the asana conception, right? In a certain sense, you do once you become a Muslim, right, you now have become subject to the rules of

God, and there's no sort of negotiation anymore. Likewise, with Dr. themer, you have consented to become subject of a summer club, but you're not an author of it anymore. And I think this is where the tension is not the substance. Right. And I think it would be interesting to see how that could be develop, because I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think it's very easy to come up with theories that are consistent with pre modern Santa Claus to why non Muslims can participate in rulemaking, but I just don't think you can find it in the pre modern tradition. So it'd be curious to hear, how would you account for this difference, right, how could you if you're interested in

creating a cult

active sense of rulemaking within the Islamic tradition that encompasses non Muslims, which of course, is a very tangible question now in Egypt, for example, right? How do you include cops fully as citizens? Right?

You know, how do you use somebody I cut off you to get there, when it's not even clear for karate, he conceives of Muslims as actively involved in rulemaking as opposed to rule finding, right? There's a difference in rule finding, like going to Quran and finding the rule, and then making your rule collectively through deliberation. Well, and also in the context of Egypt, right now, there's debate about the or some people raising the debate about Sharia being the source of the law. Right. So it's quite quite article Toompea? Well, I look, Muhammad, I agree that that there are there are differences in this whole notion of the liberal notion of, of individual autonomy on the right to

determine one's own self governance, that, that, that that to get that out of an Islamic system would take a lot of heavy theoretical lifting. But I think that it's really important, at least from my perspective, to get our points of departure straight. Because if, and this is why, to my mind, Prophet would have a bit less of a problem with this, then you are, are are implying, because he does not begin his point of departure is not a legally monistic state. It is not that at all, he has no problem with imagining, as you say, cops in Egypt, for example, I mean, having all kinds of laws that are self generated by that community, that that that he has a Muslim basically has has nothing

to do. Now. Now. This is very alien and foreign to us now. All right. And we assume that Islamic law or the quote unquote, and I think it's true, and it's one of the problems with the Islamic State, that it basically takes over that nation state model of a legally monistic order, and imposes that on everybody. That's not Al Quran, his point of departure,

and so on, when you talk about, you know, communal, communal access to self governance, I think it makes a difference, whether you're talking about illegally monistic state or illegally pluralistic state.

That doesn't solve all the problems, but I think it solves a lot.

Not from the liberal. I told you, I mean, you can get that out of there. Yeah, and I agree.

But it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that I'm any more empowered in that system than I would be under this one.

Well, Professor Sherman Jackson has given us a lot to think about. There will be a session after this, but we're gonna break right now. Please help me to thank Professor Jackson.

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