Arabic world rights (Al-Kamel)
Human rights are caught in a normative area of dispute in contemporary Islamic discourse. On the one hand, they have to be legitimised by Islam, i.e. ankered in Islamic legal thought; on the other, they have to be adaptable to a universal consensus.
In his ground-breaking book, Mahmoud Bassiouni develops a new possibility of satisfying both those requirements by conceptualising human rights as an institution to protect basic human needs based on the theory of Islamic legal objectives (maqasid al-šari a).
»This thoroughly researched study on the foundations of human rights in Islam is an important contribution to European Islam; in Germany, it will stimulate and facilitate the research and theory of a modern Islam, which finds itself subjected to attacks from Salafists and other radical challenges.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»Not only does the author deliver a good analysis of recent lines of conflict with his book, he also creates a way to transcend group-, culture- and period-specific notions of humans in order to develop a universal and culturally independent concept of the human and his universal rights.« Pankower Allgemeine Zeitung Online
»This thoroughly researched study on the foundations of human rights in Islam is an important contribution to European Islam; in Germany, it will stimulate and facilitate the research and theory of a modern Islam, which finds itself subjected to attacks from Salafists and other radical challenges.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»Not only does the author deliver a good analysis of recent lines of conflict with his book, he also creates a way to transcend group-,...
Mahmoud Bassiouni is a research fellow at the Institute of Political Sciences and at the Institute for Studies of the Islamic Culture and Religion at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main.
Mahmoud Bassiouni is a research fellow at the Institute of Political Sciences and at the Institute for Studies of the Islamic Culture and Religion...