Ways

You know

there's quite a lot of agreement nowadays

on the idea of human rights,

even international bodies have been formed around the idea,

with the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

Europe having its own Court of Human Rights,

and even the US Constitution holding a number of human rights to be self-evident,

such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, at the time, when they wrote that Constitution

saying that all men are created equal,

it really only applied if you were a white man.

Black slaves weren't offered much of any liberty

or pursuit of happiness that was going.

And there, of course, is the problem with human rights.

It rather depends on who you consider human,

or whether you consider some people more human than others.

One of the easier ways of getting an army to feel free to kill people

is to give the enemy a different name so they can be seen as less human.

And it's not just in open war,

people manage to dehumanise their fellow humans

to divide up their own communities into different groups,

with the more powerful group doing its best to eliminate the weaker group

for no more than ethnic, or tribal or religious reasons.

It's so much easier to kill someone without feeling that it's really murder

if those being killed are seen as not quite human,

and not too long ago

people who would have considered themselves

nice civilised europeans

did their best to achieve genocide on an industrial scale,

not really seeing it as murder,

more like eradicating vermin.

It's always happening somewhere around the world,

think of all the places it has happened in recent years,

even by people calling themselves muslims.

Look at the news and see for yourself.

So the problem with human rights

is one of just who is considered human

and who has the power to decide who has the rights.

It's all very well saying someone has rights

if they don't have the power to claim them.

Because inevitably, if some people have rights,

other people are going to have duties to fulfil them,

and people tend not to be so keen on that side of things.

Now when the Qur'an was revealed to Muhammad the Messenger

it made clear that from then on

all who submitted to its guidance were to be considered equal,

as brothers and sisters before God,

male or female, black or white, rich or poor, free or slave,

what mattered was what they believed

and how they acted from a moral point of view.

And for that guidance to be fulfilled,

humankind clearly needed certain rights,

such as a right to life,

as they couldn't do much good if they weren't allowed to survive,

and liberty,

as at the heart of the Deen

is the freedom to choose between good and bad.

That ability to choose between good and bad is central to our humanity.

The Qur'an says that there is to be no compulsion in the Deen,

and that our purpose is to achieve happiness

in this world and the next.

The idea of achieving success

is shouted from minarets at every call to prayer,

and the Deen preceded the US Constitution by many centuries,

as it did the French rallying cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

But these rights within the Deen were not 'claimed' by humans,

but bestowed by God,

on whose power all depends,

and to which no human power can be compared.

So God's Message does not address

the weak and downtrodden

and tell them about their rights,

but instead speaks to those with earthly power

and instructs them in their duties towards

those over whom their power extends.

Revolutions force change from the bottom up,

but often the revolutionaries quickly resort to abuses of power

similar to those perpetrated by the tyrants they overthrew.

When change to a society is ordered by God, however,

it demands change from the top down.

And in submission to God's guidance

it becomes clear that this way of life is better for all,

not just the downtrodden.

It is better not just for society,

but for all the individuals in it.

All individual muslims need to pay zakat in proportion to their means,

which means that wealth moves downwards,

making the poor feel cared for and preventing revolution.

The Messenger's mosque in Madinah had a bench for the poor,

and charity is constantly encouraged in God's Message

as well as in the advice of the Messenger.

Similarly the Qur'an frequently exhorts those with power

to free those who are enslaved.

Each individual is told to look to their own duties

to those less well off than themselves,

and with that we become aware of how much we have

compared to those with less

and feel gratitude to our Provider.

For what we receive is so much more than we give,

and keeping that in mind means we are thankful for what we have in life,

a much happier way to be

than always looking up to those who have more than us

with envy and dissatisfaction.

It is not an awareness of our human rights

that brings us satisfaction with our lot in life,

it is a sense of duty that actually brings us happiness.

So let's see what else in our way of life is likely to bring us happiness.

Is marriage really supposed to be half our Deen?

Can the Straight Path really be the Middle Way?