Research Paper

2.1.3 Law perspective – human rights, women rights, sharia, international law

The following perspective is that of a student, I make no claim of expertise in law or Islamic law.

Different countries have various combinations of law. There are human beliefs about how societies should be organized and regulated after laws. These beliefs may be secular, based on community traditions that are not framed with reference to religion, or they may be framed in the reference to religion. Religious sources include reasoning and opinions of religious legal scholars who have based their understandings on divine revelations and holy texts. In Muslim societies these understandings and reasonning form the basis of what is called “sharia”. In this thesis I will use both terms sharia and Muslim Laws. There are several schools of Muslim laws. The four main sunni schools of fiqh , or thought, that exist today were formed through the personal allegiance of legal scholars or jurists to the founders from whom each took its name: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi, Hanbali. Consequently, each School has variations according to the cultural, political and socio-economic contexts in which they were developed and the philosophy of reasoning that was accepted. The shia schools of law came into existence following a rift between Muslims after the death of the Prophet. Hence the laws they outline are clearly not direct divine revelations from God. Instead, they are laws developed through human judicial reasoning (ijtihad). The fact that these laws are not sacrosanct but are man-made is often obscured by those attempting to gain moral and political authority from them. But also obscured is the diversity of Muslim laws, which reflects the various and changing concerns of the ...

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...ere spoken from generation to generation, exactly the same text by many transmitters which precluded any possibility of collusion or error.

Sunna is the second proof, a combination of al-hadith, narrated by several transmitters. Each report is a hadith considered as having authority because God enjoys guidance by the Prophet through the Quran. Sunna confirms the Quran as the traditional theory affirms and assists in interpretation or fills empty parts of the lines.

Islamic formulas to dilute or eliminate the protections afforded by international human rights law are critically assessed by Ann Elizabeth Mayer. She discusses how these schemes reflect current debates in Muslim societies. Mayer discusses the political motives behind the selective use of elements of the Islamic tradition by conservative groups who oppose Muslim`s aspirations to enjoy human rights.