Islam and Human Rights

Catalog description

The main focus of the course is inquiry about possibility of human rights for Muslims in the modern time. The notion of human rights is represented by the United Nations documents, while Islamic teachings are divided into Islamic ethics and Islamic law. The former contains universal values such as dignity, justice, mercy, love, and freedom. The latter, in its traditional iterations, suffers from issues of gender discrimination, religious intolerance, restriction of religious freedom, the problem of apostasy, and violent punishments. Students will survey major conservative and reformist Muslim approaches to human rights to foster the development of critical analytic and comparative skills.