Minute with a Muslim #094 – Does Islam Have A Human Rights Framework

We talked about concepts and how concepts when they're translated over languages and across texts, you know, you can really get in trouble. And so we talked about justice and the lost pounds, Allah loves justice, and he loves those who are just, and he hates those who aren't just, and then we come to English and we're in year 2022. And we have the word justice, we have a lot of sort of, you know, groups or movements or ideologies that ascribe themselves to that process of justice. We have social justice warriors, and we have this and that and a third, right. And so, you know, we have to ask, the honest and open ended question is the justice of Islam or the justice that Allah wants the same

as these types of justices that people call to? And the answers will not really, you know, there's always going to be overlap, of course, but there's always going to be departure, there's going to be points of continuity, and there's going to be points of this continuity. And that goes for, you know, human rights, right, things that people call human rights these days. Does Islam have a human rights framework? It's a backwards question, right? Islam is human rights, right. And any other sort of manmade human rights framework is going to be, it's going to get some things right. And it's going to get some things horribly, horribly wrong. And it will be an entire book, or maybe even a

series of books to go into exactly, you know, specifically which things are points of confluence in which points of our port which points are points of departure. However, one of the more paradigmatic differences is how we relate to our desires, because a lot of human rights discourse is founded upon the assumption that true freedom is the ability to express my desires. So there's an internal identification with one's desires, meaning the desires that you experience are considered an essential part of yourself, which is why it's such a crime within the human rights framework, to not be able to express yourself sexually however you want, or to express yourself in a gender however

you want. Even the opportunity, right, to have some sort of sexual experiences or gendered experiences is considered a violation of human rights. Okay, this is there's a huge assumption being made here that I am my desires, or my desires are an essential part of myself completely, completely against the snap. And not just a slam, honestly, but every sort of pre modern tradition that I'm aware of holds that your desires are not who you are, okay? And they're not an essential part of yourself. In fact, you're somebody who has an essential self that has a soul, that experiences desires, desires come and go, they wash over you like a wave on the beach. And so your whole

imperative, and this is interesting, the difference here, because the ethical imperative, created by this system within Islam and other sort of pre modern traditions, is that your ethical imperative is how you interact with these desires. How do you discipline them? How do you control them? How do you take the general urge that those desires are maybe a specific manifest manifestation of and focus them and apply them in a good, wholesome, just and true way? Right? That's Islam. Okay. If you understand your desires as an essential part of yourself, what's the ethical imperative, the only ethical imperative is to express yourself is to do what you want is to lead your best life, live

your truth, all these sorts of nonsense slogans that we have these days, because the assumption is that my desires are me, I am my desires, or at least my desires, if they aren't exhaustive of who I am entirely, they're an essential part of myself, and we completely think that that is false.