Ayatollah Sadegh Amoli Larijani who was speaking in a ceremony to present Islamic Human Rights Award on Wednesday, believed that Islam had addressed the issue of rights since the conception of the religion, with jurists having discussed the rights issue as early as 4th century AD; “the real problem rises where rights and duties face the politics; in western thinking tradition, the issue finds a utilitarian aspect when comes to the man as the subject of the rights and the beneficiary; in Islamic tradition however, rights is first addressed in terms of laws of buying and selling by Mohaqeq Isfahani; the tradition holds that we should acknowledge some rights as agreed-upon phenomena, with the quiddity of rights taken for granted as it is in nature; this is really important in an accurate understanding of the relation of Islam and human rights, if we assume that Islam provides the bedrock for human rights in oriental tradition,” he detailed.
Head of the Judiciary believed that a fundamental difference had made Islamic reading and western interpretation of human rights irreconcilable, and that is the role and the place of man in the hierarchy of the creation; “they see the man as a mechanical entity devoid of its spiritual faculties; even their great law-makers admit that this view had preponderance in any compiling of human rights; in Islamic tradition, man is granted the sublime position of the surrogate of the God on earth based on Quranic verse; this sets a break with western tradition where materialism provides the basis for any debate for or against rights in general,” Ayatollah Amoli Larijani emphasized.
He criticized West as sticking only theoretically to the human rights and practically, they had failed to recognize the human rights for the others outside the Occidental tradition and the view that gave the European man centralized position in a hierarchy of different human races; “the UN for example, would be silenced by the imperialists and the circles of wealth; Sheikh Isa Qassim is stripped of his nationality while he had been pursuing only peaceful means to change the status quo; in Palestine, children and women are subject to cruel measures by the Zionist regime, and the international community is merely looking the scene with deafening silence,” he objected.
“The EU even had failed to house properly refugees of crises and wars the major cause of which had been EU policies; Iran however, has kept a stiff upper lip in facing the refugees from Afghanistan for years; I would call the Europeans for a debate over human rights which would be organized by the Foreign Ministry to show that Islamic human rights seeks to redeem the human dignity,” Amoli Larijani concluded.
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