Beyond Secular Legal Frameworks: Islamic Legal Thought and the International Protection of Religious Freedom and Minority Rights

Abstract

This article examines whether the frequently assumed opposition between Islamic legal thought and secular international human rights law, particularly with respect to religious freedom and minority protection, is as absolute as it is often portrayed. Rather than testing whether Islamic law can be reconciled with a fixed international standard, the paper treats both traditions as internally plural, historically situated normative systems and asks where they actually meet, where they genuinely diverge, and what kind of reasoning would be needed to negotiate the difference. Drawing on classical juristic concepts such as maqasid al-shari'ah, maslahah, and the historical dhimma framework, alongside the instruments and jurisprudence of international human rights law, the article argues that the relationship is better described as a field of selective convergence, principled disagreement, and unfinished interpretive negotiation than as a binary contest between "Islamic" and "Western" values. It identifies genuine points of contact, most notably in shared commitments to human dignity, communal protection, and restraints on arbitrary power, while also confronting unresolved tensions concerning apostasy, equal citizenship irrespective of religion, and the relationship between individual and collective rights. The paper's principal contribution is a dialogical framework that neither subordinates Islamic legal reasoning to a secular universal standard nor treats Islamic sources as immune from critical scrutiny, but instead specifies the conditions under which cross-traditional legal reasoning can proceed without erasing the distinctiveness of either tradition. The analysis is doctrinal and comparative rather than empirical, drawing on primary legal instruments, classical juristic literature, and contemporary scholarship rather than fieldwork or survey data, and its conclusions are offered as contributions to an ongoing scholarly conversation rather than as a settled resolution of the underlying disagreements between the two traditions.