Many in the Muslim community have long taken issue with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The declaration, these critics attest, was created by colonial powers with a history of gross human-rights violations, and amounts to yet another attempt by a few Western players to impose their will upon Muslim countries. Islamic conservatives and fundamentalists go further, as they declare that no human invention can equal — much less supersede — Shariah law, which amounts to the word of God.
This clash between the U.N.'s secular human-rights standards and Muslim religious doctrine mirrors the broader conflict between Islam and modernity — a conflict that has left some citizens of Muslim countries, including women and non-Muslims, highly vulnerable. Fortunately, an emerging school of Muslim thought addresses the question in a new way, emphasizing that the Quran, like any religious text, must be interpreted — and that those interpretations can change over time.
In fact, the Quran does defend principles like liberty, impartiality and righteousness, which indicates a fundamental respect for justice and human dignity. The problem, as emphasized by the Iranian theologian Mohsen Kadivar, is that many parts of Shariah law are linked to pre-modern social structures, which deny women or non-Muslims the same protections as Muslim men receive.