Ayesha Mahmood Malik, UK
Years before the horrors of the holocaust actually unfolded, a systematic programme of persecution against the Jews began to take root when, in 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. Jews were excluded from public life, faced dismissals and boycotts, and in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped them of their citizenship and civil rights. In 1938, open violence in the form of destruction of synagogues and mass arrests began, leading up to the ‘genocidal phase’, commencing with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Living at the time of these mass crimes was Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who would go on to lose most of his family in the holocaust. With the onset of Nazi state-sponsored persecution in the 30s, Lemkin started a campaign to outlaw the atrocities and, in 1933, at the Madrid Conference, proposed criminalising ‘crimes of barbarity’ and ‘crimes of vandalism.’ His proposals were rejected at the time, but the increasing scale of shocking barbarism injected more rigour in Lemkin’s pursuit to coin a term he believed would represent the ‘index of civilisation’.
In 1944 Lemkin devised the term “genocide” – with hybrid Greek and Latin etymology: Greek (genos) meaning race, tribe or people and Latin (cide) to denote killing. Lemkin was clear, however, that he did not intend to limit the term to represent mass killings alone, but as a broad-spectrum phrase to comprise cultural annihilation, including the erosion of language and religion, economic strangulation and the prevention of births.
Lemkin’s activism eventually led to the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1948, widely seen as a ground-breaking international instrument for the prevention and punishment of future genocides. Yet, nearly eight decades on, genocide dots the pages of the history of different parts of the globe: Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Sudan… and rages on today despite the proliferation of human rights treaties internationally.
What Lemkin’s aspirations in ink did not foretell was a contest between his legal ambitions and the political will for achieving structural justice. Today, recognising justice along with recognising genocide have both become fantastical – relegated as legal and political art forms. Against this backdrop, the Head of the Worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad (aba), has repeatedly called for the importance of a global need for absolute justice, spelling out the need for world leaders to become archetypes of the same. He has also continually warned against the dangers of a Third World War with devastating consequences.
If mass atrocities against humanity are to be prevented, the world needs a moral reset. The Qur’anic antidote for preventing horrors such as genocide is a shift in focus towards an internal ethical reform whereby one incurs a striving against one’s soul and prepares a ground of morality whereupon seeds of justice might be sown. The Holy Qur’an provides the blueprint for achieving this through doing good “as between kindred”, which is outlined as the highest gradation of man’s moral development, i.e., when a person does good out of natural impulse resembling the instincts that flow from maternal affection – it states:
“Verily, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving like kindred; and forbids indecency and manifest evil and transgression. He admonishes you that you may take heed.” (16:91)
A genuine commitment towards achieving justice is the only means of transcending the legal and political realities around the ‘horrors of humanity’ the world faces today.
About the Author: Ayesha Mahmood Malik is the Editor of the Law and Human Rights Section of the Review of Religions magazine. She is interested in Law and Religion, in particular Islam and Human Rights, the role of media in crisis reporting, International Human Rights and the import of religion on radicalisation. She has spoken frequently on these issues in the national media and various universities in the UK, including the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
Add Comment