Rethinking Islam and Human Rights

Reviews / Votes

Pensive, philosophical, interdisciplinary, and very ambitious in tackling its questions, Rethinking Islam and Human Rights is a major study that systematically explores and portrays the interaction between traditional textual and modern-day experiential Islamic knowledge. In doing so, the author convincingly demonstrates how and why social movement practice unknowingly produces socially transformative Islamic knowledge on human rights in a manner that brings greater alignment between the two. * M. Hakan Yavuz, Professor at the University of Utah and author of The Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanism * Drawing on his own academic formation and many years as an activist intellectual, Ozcan Keles has written a penetrating case study of one of the most prominent Islamic civil society movements operating in today's world. Rethinking Islam and Human Rights presents an in-depth examination of Islam as a lived religious practice framed by careful theoretical considerations deftly combining insights from the social sciences, theology, and philosophy. * Carool Kersten, Professor of Islamic Studies at Catholic University Leuven * Rethinking Islam and Human Rights is an exhaustive, well-documented, and superbly reasoned analysis of the protection of human rights by Muslims, without identifying their purpose in those terms. Such 'a rose, by any other word' is the pragmatic way to overlapping consensus on the universality of human rights, among the profoundly and permanently diverse cultures of the world. * Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, Professor Emeritus at Emory University and author of Decolonizing Human Rights * Ozcan Keles, academic, barrister and activist, ably analyses Hizmet's evolution from a socially conservative religious congregation to a culturally and religiously emancipatory movement that provides a pragmatic framework for dialectical debate between traditional practices and lived experience of Islam. This book makes a valuable contribution to the hard, unfinished labour of realizing human rights and women's irreplaceable roles. * Alison Scott Baumann, Professor of Society and Belief Law Dept, SOAS, University of London and lead author of Islam on Campus and Freedom of Speech in Universities * Rethinking Islam and Human Rights offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between Islam and human rights, challenging conventional narratives that often see the two as contradictory. The book's main strength lies in its practice-based approach, replacing normativediscussions that tend to focus on the interpretation of religious texts. Keles explores how everyday practices within the Hizmet movement can change the way human rightsare viewed in the Islamic context. Through this study, he opens up new insights that link social dynamics with epistemic transformation, showing that changes in Islamic understanding can arise from practical actions. * Sasmi Selvia, Religion *