Islam, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights beyond the Law.

The past two decades have seen a revived debate about the relationship between religion and human rights, with some historians suggesting that the origins of the latter are more to be found in mid-twentieth century Christianity than the liberal secular project from which they are today understood as inseparable. And yet, there is limited work on the relationship between Islam and human rights from a similarly historical perspective. This essay seeks to fill this lacuna by illustrating the ways in which the Ahmadiyya, a Muslim movement founded in the late nineteenth century British Punjab, pioneered human rights. Having suffered politicised persecution from the Pakistani state since partition, there is extensive legal literature lamenting the failure of human rights to protect the Ahmadiyya. But what if we were to consider the Ahmadiyya as agent rather than victim? For, in fact, this supposed minority themselves took part in the creation of the human rights regime that is now used to decry their persecution. Specifically, they were innovators of the vision of global religious freedom that was embedded in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Having investigated this overlooked history, the essay explores the motivations behind the Ahmadiyya's turn to human rights, which they argued were a fundamentally Muslim project. Such an investigation not only centres Muslims in the history of human rights, a history in which they are usually seen as peripheral if not antagonistic, but also provides new perspectives on the relationship of these rights to international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]