There has been a dearth of studies in English on customs pertaining to the commemoration of the household of Muḥammad in Southeast Asia and the Malay-Indonesian world in the nineteenth century. This article aims to draw the attention of readers to an observation/report on the ten days of Muḥarram in Sumatra, Indonesia presented by nineteenth-century Dutch scholars. This work can be seen as a starting point for other researchers interested in investigating how Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian religious cultures and rituals are interlinked. In addition to describing the background and literature of the tābūt festival in Muḥarram and Dutch scholars’ observations, the English version of a Dutch article by Oscar Lewis Helfrich and his colleagues in 1888 is presented. It ends with a final word as well as a list of works on the tābūt in the Malay-Indonesian world.
After World War II the United Nations developed new international law constructs in cooperation with the majority of the world's nations, which were mainly based on a Western hermeneutic of rights. This international humanistic project provided new anthropological constructs which were seen as compatible or non-compatible, by Muslims or non-Muslims, with Islam. When analyzing these discussions on Islam and human rights discourse into a typology they can provide insights where compatibility and non-compatibility lies, and where possible reinterpretation is needed. Within the typology, two forms of discourses can be discerned: Islamic human rights discourse as the internal Muslim discourse on human rights and the external 'Islam and human rights' discourse which emerged together with the modern human rights regimes. By analyzing the different elements of what constitutes Islam and human rights discourse we can derive new understandings and strategies in how to engage a modern Islamic human rights discourse and constitute an Islamic science of human rights (ʿilm al-ḥuqūq) which provides a hermeneutics of continuity between Islam and modern human rights and overcomes both apologetics and othering.
KeywordsIslam and human rights -ḥuqūq Allāh wa-ḥuqūq al-ʿibād -Islamic reform -Islamic jurisprudence -Islam and modernity
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