Earlier this year the US' pre-eminent school of law posted a verse of the Holy Quran at the entrance of its law faculty.
The verse reads:
“O ye who believe!
Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses
To Allah, even as against
Yourselves, or your parents,
Or your kin, and whether
It be (against) rich or poor:
For Allah can best protect both.”
Regardless of the completeness or accuracy of the quote (the verse, Surah 4:135, is truncated and not properly translated; the full and more accurate translation may be read here: http://quran.com/4/135), the problem with it is that it invokes "Allah" as the source and arbiter of justice and rights and the Surah from which it comes is one that elaborates on what Allah's "justice" involves, commanding that:
- "humiliating punishment" will be given to anyone who is not a "believer" or who "disobeys Allah" [4:151 and 4:14 respectively], including anyone who does not share their wealth [4:37] or flaunts it [4:38];
- that under the law "men are in charge of women" [4:34] and that any women who has sexual relations outside of legal wedlock must be put to death (unless Allah wills otherwise) [4:15];
- Allah will "drive them into a Fire" all who "disbelieve" whereby "Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment." [4:56];
- of apostates to "seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper" [4:89];
- for believers not to befriend non-believers [4:139-140];
- that one may not charge interest on loans [4:161]
Harvard Law's entrance wall has just three quotes, being the three considered by the faculty as the most "universally applicable" of the 150 that were submitted for consideration. The other two are “An unjust law is no law at all” [St Augustine] and “To no one will We sell, to none will We deny or defer, right or justice” [from the Magna Carta].
The ironic truth is that Harvard (and the world by following it's lead) is in effect selling, denying and deferring what remains of Western (i.e., enlightened) notions of rights and justice for Quranic teachings that are (by Western standards) wholly wrong and unjust.
What the West needs right now is for influential institutions like Harvard to promote the idea that justice is based in objective reality, not in mysticism, and how only objective law - that is, law derived from an objective code of ethics - can ever assign just and proper effects to appropriate actors in a societal setting, and, not to promote any ideas that are in contradiction with this basic principle.
"Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves."- Ayn Rand, “Vast Quicksands, The Objectivist Newsletter, July 1963, p25