Adamiyyah (humanity) and ‘ismah (inviolability): Humanity as the ground for universal human rights in Islamic law

Abstract

Dr. Recep Şentürk is the president of Ibn Khaldun University (IHU) in Istanbul, Turkey. He has researched human rights as a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Law at Emory University, Atlanta (2002-2003). He continued his research on human rights as a guest of the British Academy in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law at Oxford Brookes University, and he has lectured on the same topic in various universities in the United Kingdom. He has written extensively on the concept of pluralism and Islam and on Islam and human rights. In this brief interview, he discusses human rights through the prism of “humanity.” 1. How would you describe the engagement between the Islamic tradition and the human rights discourse? A legal maxim in Islamic law states, “the right to inviolability (Ismah) is due for humanity (adamiyyah).” This right to inviolability includes inviolability of life, property, religion, mind (freedom of expression), family, and honor. All Hanafi (a rite of Islamic jurisprudence)124 jurists uphold this perspective, as do “universalist” jurists in other rites of Islamic jurisprudence. Thus, according to this perspective, simply being human is sufficient to possess human rights regardless of innate, inherited, and gained attributes such as sex, religion, race, and nationality…