Saudi Sheik Sa'd Al-Breik on Human Rights in Islam and in the West

Saudi sheik Sa'd Al-Breik gave a lecture on human rights in Islam and in the West, on the Saudi-based religious channel, Iqra TV. Following are excertps from his lecture:

We pray to Allah to accept the Muslims who were killed as martyrs, and place their souls in Paradise. We pray He will strengthen the believers facing this (U.S.) occupation, colonialism, tyranny, and evil barbarity, brought upon them with tanks and planes, and then they are told: Believe that strength, repression, victory, blood, and crushing are democracy.

Believe us, when the knives in our hands stab your stomachs and hearts, that we have come to rescue you. Believe us, when we turn you into lines of people standing before convoys of food and drink, that we are bringing you pure, sweet water. Believe us, when we see you tormented by the pain of death and hunger, that we came in order to feed you manna and quail. Believe us that when we crush you and disrespect the elderly man or woman, show no mercy to a small child, or an orphan, and have no compassion for the woman, the bereaved mother, and the widow ? Believe us that we have come to honor you and to rescue you from this tyranny and despotism.

The first to issue human rights, or the first to speak of human rights were those who came after the French Revolution. Their prophet or leader or the one who initiated all this was the Frenchman Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract, which appeared 11 centuries after Islam. That is, after Islam - After 'Call the name of your God the Creator', after 'We have honored man' and after 'We have created man in perfect form.' Eleven centuries after all this, that is, 1,100 years later, they suddenly realized that there is a creature called a human being, and that this human being has rights. And they started legislating the rights of this human being, from their own heads.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot began to theorize after the French Revolution, the revolution against religious persecution, the violations of individual freedoms and the expropriation of property. Only then did they come up with this (Declaration Of The Rights Of Man).

Human rights focus on two issues ? the political change of government and the woman issue. In our Islamic society, when they talk of human rights, they usually talk of these two issues with the intention of claiming that the Islamic ways of assessing reality, the regime, and the ruler, and the means for reforming them and advising the ruler must be thrown away so their place can be taken by the political parties, pluralism, and factionalism that is called democracy. As a result, anyone whose platform wins the majority of votes is the one before whom people must bow down, whether he's a clown, a movie star, a pop or rock star, or Bony M ? Call it as you like, as long as he's a star for whom the masses vote...

In the Middle Ages, Europe experienced the most loathsome forms of human rights violations, by means of oppressive legislation and regimes. This was manifested in feudalism, in the privilege of the nobility, in the tyranny of the Church, in the enslavement of the others, in barbaric punishments, and in the unprecedented torture of those who did not submit to the rule of the Church, even in their minds ? and woe betide them if they used methods of experimentation, implementation, and scientific research instead of acknowledging the useless drivel and lies of the Church.

As you know, Pythagoras was burned at the stake, as was Copernicus and a group of people who invented certain inventions, because they refused to acknowledge the absolute rule of the Church at that time and wanted to base themselves to some extent on their minds, not on nonsense and fairy tales.

The Jews, of course, think none but themselves worthy of respect in any form, and so do the extremist Rightists from among the Christians, who think no man is worthy of living in freedom and dignity. They say everyone must convert to Christianity, or be killed. You all know that there was a time when Inquisition trials were held, and people were sentenced in their graves, and their bodies were exhumed, sentenced in absentia after their death, and the remains of their bones burned after their sentence was handed down. So where are human rights?

The idea of human rights expanded to include sexual freedom, homosexuality, and the right to atheism. Human rights in the West are tainted by contradictions. While they equalize woman and man in fornication, sex, and vice, they differentiate between them in wages. Some laws in Europe give a woman half a man's wage, prevent her from keeping her surname, and even require her to take her husband's. These laws that presume to call for women's rights neglect the natural differences between man and woman and give the woman rights she is incapable of bearing.

Remember what I tell you, though the future is in the hands of Allah. After America insists on clear interference in everything, including our curricula, it will again interfere in the matter of Islamic law, claiming it contradicts human rights. They will say the Islamic punishments are barbaric and incompatible with any degree of mercy and compassion towards man, and must be replaced with man-made laws ? and if disagreement breaks out among people on this matter, America will say it should be brought to a vote.