Grounded in a rights based society

Salaams brothers. 

Jumaa Mubarak. 

It seems like an age, but just over two weeks ago Lady Hale brought our Government to it’s knees; it’s then Brexit strategy lay in taters around the ankles of State. 

Many people, including some Judges, were surprised by the unanimous judgment. They believed that the Supreme Court had overstepped it’s mark. That no court had any mandate to interfere in the job of the Executive- the Government- that derives it’s authority from the very people it seeks to govern.  

Usul ul Fiqh, the roots of jurisprudence, began likewise by  inducing rules from law as practised, so as to lend coherence to it. But law as is practised is another beast. 

Until just last week I thought that a rights based society predated the revolution that Islam brought to the World. That when both Plato and Aristotle said that man attains his fullest form within state, because that is where he can realise his fullest capabilities. And that thus Statehood is a natural extension of man trying to be man. That they were talking from the stand point of rights. 

But I have just now learnt that they saw society as a fully functioning body: as an animal, with a head and limbs. There every man is simply a cell and performs a function for the greater good of all. And if he does not perform the function that is required of him, then the body of State sickens. 

How far from a rights based view of society this is. For here men have no right to freedom; they have instead  a responsibility to the State as an extension of their manhood and have right to little else, much less freedom. 

And there within that understanding, the State has both power and right to run roughshod over the rights, needs and freedoms of it’s constituent people; men, women and children. And is not accountable to anybody. 

Indeed our very conception of society, and state, that we live in here and in this age take as a given, has origin within Islam. 

That the executive is not above the law, and that the job of State is to balance the playing field as was so clearly told to us in Abu Bakr’s (the successor of the Messenger (saw)) first address to the people. 

Muslims are the ones that are grounded in rights one of another, even to the extent that we know the right that a son holds over his father, and the commensurate right that a father holds over his son. And it is this set of rights and obligations that grounds Muslim society to immutable standards. 

Indeed one man’s right is another man’s, or many mens’, responsibility. 

It is one of our Hadeeth Qudsi; where God talks to us, within a saying of our blessed Messenger (saw); that lays the foundations for universal human rights. 

There we are obliged as a people, and as a whole, to look after the destitute, the hungry and the alone. 

And it is the codex of law contained in the Quran and the Sunnah that saw the inception of a completely independent judiciary, even from the first day that the Messenger (saw) left us with the burden to uphold justice, even that is if it goes against ourselves. And more so on that occasion. 

We too are the ones that know that the most universal right is that held by the Most Gracious Creator of all. That it is for us to come to know Him, to recognise Him, to be grateful and thankful to Him, to worship Him as befits His Majesty, and then to ask of Him from His bounty. Anything less is corruption and a rebellion against the very fabric of existence and nature. 

Ours was the first truly modern society; a society founded on the Basmalla - in the name of Allah (the proper name of God), the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful- wherein even the right of the morsel of food that we consume is recognised and subsumed because of, and through, His Grace.  

And to us belongs the future. 

For we have much more to give. 

And time is on our side.