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Excerpts
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| Finding Man | |
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| Nadia Yassine, 2007-06-22 |
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| Let us move forward in history, let us run faster and farther towards this utopia that is not at all chimerical. Let us say that, freed from the straitjacket in which it is confined in many Muslim societies by certain retrogressive traditions, islam would resound favorably in all hearts where the human element prevails over the bestial. As it had already been in humankind’s history, islam will once again become the guarantor of fundamental human rights. Above all, it will teach man the Truth, the secret of his passage on earth, for “man swarms on the planet feeling useless. Talk of his rights will change nothing when the concept of man disappears.”1 |
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| What is man? What is the other? What can “human rights” mean when claimed by a humanity that considers itself stuck in a meaningless and aimless passage on this planet? What rights—and for which man—when humanity wanes or becomes transformed into a naked beast? Which man are we speaking of: the Northerner living carefree in opulence, or the Southerner who shuffles along in his caravan of woes? |
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| Surely the rights written down in international charters remain a dead letter in a world where words are coined and change meaning from one side to the other, one country to another, one ego to another, from me to the other! “The brave meaning of words,” as Merleau-Ponty put it, leads us to wonder if “the right to live” has the same meaning under skies as different as those over Bangladesh and Sweden. Speaking of the right to leisure would be an insult in the “cities of joy”—how numerous they are!—in the world forgotten by modernity or, rather, plundered by modernity. The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” is a sweet and fluffy daydream which will not stop Realpolitik for one single moment. It is the new opiate of the masses. You must search for your homeland elsewhere than in the fluctuating and uprooted meanings of modernist culture unless you wish to live in illusion and vague imaginings. What miracle can gather concepts that disintegrate at the least blow of the racist wind, at the least suspicion of economic breeze? |
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| But let us return again to our utopia. Since islam has its “geographical dimensions, its population weight, [and] its economic potentialities that make it one of the major components of the international community,”( 2) it must strive hard to promote a new conception of balance and, as dictated by its nature, work for the establishment of human dignity in peace and harmony. |
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| In L’humanisme de l’islam [Islamic humanism](3) Marcel Boisard becomes the advocate of Muslim law. He presents it as the energetic agent that prompted the awakening of medieval legal consciousness. He asserts that islam is “able to bring an essential contribution to the updating of the international law, thanks to its provisions that are protective of human rights.” |
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| Father Pierre Lelong, commenting on Broisard’s statement, proposes the following: In order to be convinced of the validity of such analysis, we as Westerners, Europeans and Christians, must know better the reality of the Qur’ānic message beyond past prejudices and present misunderstandings. In order to comprehend “where islam is going,” perhaps we need fi rst to ask ourselves if we sufficiently know where it comes from and what it is.(4) |
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| For this reason our continuing reflection will dig through the litter of the inaccurate accusations that overwhelm islam. It will denounce deviant practices. It will persist in being politically incorrect, historically unacceptable, and dogmatically unbearable for certain prevalent thinking. |
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| *From the Book "Full Sails Ahead" (available online at www.jspublishing.net). |
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| NOTES |
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| (1) Cf. Jacques Berque, Une cause jamais perdue [a cause never lost], A. Michel, p. 299. (2) Idem, in “L’islam à l’horizon 2000” [Islam by the year 2000], 15th century after the hegira. (3) Marcel Boisard, A. Michel, 1980. Boisard is a professor of international law at the University of Geneva. (4) Pierre Lelong, “L’islam et l’Occident” [Islam and the West], in Revue du Tiers-Monde (cf. n. 26), p. 750. Lelong is an advisor to the Vatican Secretariat on relations with non-Christian religions. |
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