Islam and Human Rights: Why It's Up to the Muslim Community to Prove Itself

My legal and advocacy work both in the U.S. and abroad has given me the unique opportunity to view challenges faced by the Muslim community in multifarious socio-political settings. What is clear to me is that the challenges faced, and to be faced in the coming century, by the Muslim community require the utilization of the same individual and societal instruments under evaluation. These include the appropriate and permissible application of individual and communal freedoms, the freedom as an individual to study one's faith and offer new and relevant interpretations of such, and the freedom for a community as a whole to practice its faith in the public and private sphere. And so, I see major challenges faced by the Muslim community in the twenty-first century as coming from two arenas: 1) intra-community differences, such as disparate interpretations of gender roles, or differing theological and historical critical interpretations of the Quran; and 2) extra-community relations, such as variant understandings of how self (Muslim) versus other (non-Muslim) should interact and the responsibilities of each toward the other.

Much of my legal and advocacy work while at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, non-partisan law firm that protects the free expression of all faiths, has been in Muslim communities in the Muslim world, particularly in Egypt and Pakistan, where the central short and long-term challenge is a government that is authoritarian and/or corrupt. State control of religion, whether through monitoring of mosque sermons or prosecution of "deviant" interpretations -- Shia, Koranist, Ahmadi, or even Sunni -- under national security pretexts, politicizes religion so that "Islam" ultimately becomes a tool to be manipulated by the state to best serve its interests. The realization of religious freedom, free speech, and other fundamental human rights is dependent on adequate checks on government power. With activists routinely imprisoned and harassed, the countercurrent to government restrictions is always struggling to gather momentum.

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