ভূমিকা

be careful of (your duty to) Allah with the care which is due to Him, and do not die unless you are Muslims.” (3:102) The term 'right' is not found in the Qur'an with the modern sense of the 'rights of man', 'consumer rights', and even 'animal rights', that pepper the newspapers of our cities. The sense of 'right' in Islamic sources, the Qur'an and ahadith , is of what is due to one or is befitting because of the harmonious hierarchical order of the universe.

This is the sense of 'right' in which it is God's right that He be feared, and this is also the sense of 'right' employed in the essay attributed to Imam Sajjad (as) , Risalah al-Huquq (The Treatise on Rights):[^1] The greatest of God's rights against you is the right which He has made incumbent upon you for Himself and which is the root of all rights, then those which He has made incumbent upon you in yourself, from your crown to your foot, in keeping with the diversity of your organs.

He has given your tongue a right against you, your hearing a right against you, your sight a right against you, your hand a right against you, your leg a right against you, your stomach a right against you, and your private part a right against you. These are the seven organs through which acts take place.

Then He gave your acts rights against you: He gave your ritual prayer a right against you, your fasting a right against you, your charity a right against you, your offering a right against you, and your acts a right against you. Then these rights extend out from you to others who have rights against you.

The most incumbent of them against you are the rights toward your leaders, then the rights toward your subjects, then the rights toward your relatives.[^2] One of the major challenges posed by the modern Western world for the Islamic world pertains to the issue of rights, particularly, human rights. In what follows, I would like to consider the nature of this challenge and reflect upon how the religious orientation of Islam may provide guidance for the articulation of a response.

The challenge is moral as well as political. The foreign policy of the US during the last decades of the twentieth century has focused on the issues of human rights and democratization.