Abstract

The theory of essential and accidental aspects of religion is the principal framework employed by Muslim religious intellectuals to reconcile the eternity of Islamic law (Sharia) with the demands of the contemporary world. Within this framework, human rights, conceived as natural, universal, and meta-religious rights, serve as the criterion for distinguishing the permanent teachings of religion from its historical and cultural elements. Accordingly, any teaching incompatible with human rights is regarded as accidental and devoid of enduring validity. Despite the centrality of this claim, the legitimacy of human rights as a criterion for evaluating religious teachings has rarely been critically examined. Using a descriptive-analytical method, this study reconstructs the argument underlying this claim and evaluates its ontological, epistemological, anthropological, and Islamic legal-philosophical foundations. The findings show that this criterion rests on assumptions such as the meta-religious nature of human rights, the sufficiency of autonomous human reason to discover rights, and the possibility of judging Sharia accordingly. These assumptions, however, face fundamental challenges. Moreover, the conventional (i'tibārī) nature of rights, the epistemic limitations of human reason, disagreements over the interpretation of human rights, their dependence on the philosophical foundations of modern civilization, and their inability to account for both worldly and otherworldly human interests prevent them from serving as an authority equal or superior to Sharia. Accordingly, human rights lack the requisite authority to distinguish the essential from the accidental aspects of religion.