Islamic law and human rights
Subtitle: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
By: by Moataz El Fegiery
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9781443894791
Subjects: Human rights; Religious aspects; Islam; Jamʻīyat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn (Egypt)
Description: "This book explores the development of the Muslim Brotherhood’s thinking on Islamic law and human rights, and argues that the Muslim Brotherhood has exacerbated, rather than solved, tensions between the two in Egypt. The organisation and its scholars have drawn on hard-line juristic opinions and reinvented certain concepts from Islamic traditions in ways that limit the scope of various human rights, and advocate for Islamic alternatives to international human rights. The book concludes that the peaceful management of political and religious diversity in society cannot be realised under the Muslim Brotherhood’s model of a Shari‘a state and advocates for the drastic reformation of traditional Islamic law and state impartiality towards religion, as an alternative to the development of a Shari‘a state or exclusionary secularism. This transformation is, however, contingent upon significant long-term political and socio-cultural changes, and it is clear that successfully expanding human rights protection in Egypt requires not the exclusion of Islamists, but their transformation. Islamists still have a large constituency and they are not the only actors who are ambivalent about human rights. Meanwhile, Islamic law also appears to continue to influence Egypt’s law. The book explores the prospects for certain constitutional and institutional measures to facilitate an evolutionary interpretation of Islamic law, provide a baseline of human rights and gradually integrate international human rights into Egyptian law." -- Book jacket.
Notes: "This book is an extended version of my PhD thesis from the school of Oriental and African studies (SOAS), University of London, which was written between 2011-2015." -- Page ix.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 250-316) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction – Islamic law and human rights: conceptual and theoretical issues – Human rights under the rule of Shari’a – Political pluralism and dissent – Religion and freedom of expression – The rights of religious minorities – Apostasy and its legal implications – Women’s rights in Islam – Conclusion.