First, I should explain what I mean by saying that the...

First, I should explain what I mean by saying that the concept of human rights is foreign to Islam. Actually, it would be more appropriate to speak of a family of concepts of human rights, because moral and political theorists in the West have developed differing concepts of rights about which there is considerable controversy. However, these concepts have a shared history with roots in Roman jurisprudence and Stoic natural law theory.

The concepts that developed in the West from these roots, through Ockham, Hobbes and Locke, to contemporary theorists, such as Wellman, Nozick and Raz, have, until very recently, been completely isolated from comparable ideas discussed in the intellectual world of Islam.

Since Western ideas of human rights only became familiar in the Islamic world with the constitutional movements of the nineteenth century, and since the concepts dominating contemporary political discussions of human rights in international forums are grounded in Western traditions of political thought, it is fair to say that the concept of human rights is foreign to Islam.

From this it does not follow that all value judgments made on the basis of human rights should be considered unIslamic, if by unIslamic we refer to that which conflicts with the doctrines and values of Islam. Some judgments made on the basis of unIslamic systems of thought may be in agreement with Islam.

For instance, one may arrive at the judgment that the poor should be helped on the basis of Marxism, Buddhism or Islam; in fact, this is such a trite judgment (although no less important for being trite) that it would be hard to find a system of thought with serious numbers of adherents that did not agree with helping the poor. So, we have to be careful to distinguish the conceptual systems in the context of which value judgments arise from those value judgments themselves.

The refutation of a conceptual system is not sufficient to refute the truth of the judgments based upon it. In order to refute those judgments, one must bring reasons against them from the conceptual resources one accepts.