Human Rights and the law from an Islamic Law Perspective

Hafsa Khan, PhD Candidate, Centre for Islamic Thought and Education

The Centre for Islamic Thought and Education would like to invite you to a Public Lecture on ‘Human Rights and the law from an Islamic Law Perspective’.

Scholars like Jack Donnelly have stated “the sense in which Westerners understand the term [human rights] are quite foreign to Islamic culture.”  This lecture examines the legal and historical perspectives of Islamic versus ‘Western’ human rights, and addresses misconceptions that commonly abound when it comes to Islam and human rights. Are human rights so intrinsically Western?  Are they so foreign to Islam? And what are the basic differences between Western and Islamic legal systems?

Hafsa Khan is an Australian Muslim born to parents from the Pashtun tribal north of Pakistan. She is a Lawyer by qualification from the Queensland University of Technology, currently undertaking a PhD as a member of the Centre for Islamic Thought and Education (CITE). Her PhD thesis focuses on the cultural and traditional norms relating to marriage practices in the Pashtun Muslim majority province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) in North Pakistan. At a broader level, her research aims to investigate the interplay between culture and Islamic law (sharī‘a) in order to determine the role culture plays in upholding practices that may contradict Islamic legal principles. Her research also seeks to ascertain the attitudes of Pashtun Muslims with the aim of effecting legal reform in order to work towards realising the legal rights of women in Muslim cultural societies, both within the scope of Islamic and international human rights law.