How will Muslim societies and states deal with the rights of the individual?
This a complicated question, not only because there is a difference between individual and group rights, but also because of the unique way that Islam as a religion treats the individual. As I understand it (and I stand to be corrected if I have an erroneous interpretation of this), the concept of Tawhid, which means “making one” in Arabic, means integrating state institutions and personal priorities through a recognition of God’s overarching sovereignty. Therefore, the individual exists not as a separate being endowed by God or natural law with certain rights, but as a person who has certain obligations to God—and that the state and its institutions have some role in determining what those obligations are. In the Western experience, the rights and obligations of the individual toward God and the state were worked out through not only different and separate developments of canon and civil law, but also through the emergence of the idea of individual conscience as indispensable in t