Book Review: Islam and Human Rights by Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan

Muhammad Ali Jinnah the first Governor General and Founder of Pakistan, meeting Sir Zafrulla Khan the first Foreign Minister of Pakistan. This image is AI generated by Gemini

Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan’s Islam and Human Rights (first published 1967) is a concise, systematic apologetic that reprints the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, article by article, argues that the Declaration’s core values — dignity, freedom, justice, and equality — were anticipated and grounded in the Qur’an some fourteen centuries earlier; it is best read as a work of moral advocacy by a uniquely qualified insider rather than as detached comparative scholarship.
Khan’s authority is exceptional and verifiable: he was Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister (1947), President of the UN General Assembly (17th session, 1962–63), and a judge (1954–61) and later President (1970–73) of the International Court of Justice — and a prominent Ahmadi Muslim who, in the December 1948 UN debates, personally defended the right to change one’s religion (Article 18) against Saudi opposition, a fact confirmed by multiple academic sources and by Eleanor Roosevelt’s own recollection.
The book’s strengths are its clarity, its authoritative provenance, and its genuine textual parallels (dignity 17:70, justice 4:135/5:8, no compulsion 2:256, brotherhood 49:13); its weaknesses are an apologetic tendency to assert Islam’s “superiority,” light engagement with counter-evidence on apostasy, gender, and slavery, and a reliance on broad “values” rather than specific legal doctrine — tensions that honest contemporary readers must weigh independently.

Key Findings

The book is structured as a running commentary on the UDHR. After an introduction and a section on Islamic first principles, Khan reproduces the Declaration’s Preamble and thirty articles and pairs each with Qur’anic verses and Prophetic traditions. Reviewer Zia H. Shah (Chief Editor of The Muslim Times) confirms that Khan “discussed each Article in the light of various verses of the holy Quran.” One earlier edition reviewer notes the method plainly: Khan “reprints the Declaration of Human Rights and then writes a comparison to Islam for each section.” The Muslim Times Amazon
Khan’s central thesis is that Islam and the UDHR share a common moral purpose, without claiming verbatim identity. In his own carefully hedged words, Islam “lays down broad values and standards which clearly endorse the spirit and purpose of the Declaration” but “does not pronounce verbatim on all the specific provisions.” This is the interpretive key to the whole book: he argues for convergence of spirit, not one-to-one legal equivalence. themuslimtimes
The author is not a bystander to the UDHR — he is part of its history. On 10 December 1948, speaking for Pakistan, Khan defended Article 18’s freedom “to change his religion or belief,” countering Saudi Arabia’s Jamil Baroody. Academic sources (Amjad Mahmood Khan, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 2023; Oxford Human Rights Hub; Project MUSE) credit this intervention with preventing any Muslim-majority state from voting against the Declaration.
The UDHR was adopted 48–0 with 8 abstentions, and the split among Muslim states is central to the book’s significance: Pakistan voted yes, while Saudi Arabia abstained, largely over Article 18’s religious-freedom clause.
The Qur’anic parallels Khan marshals are corroborated by a wide body of independent scholarship — dignity (17:70), justice even against oneself (4:135) and toward enemies (5:8), no compulsion in religion (2:256), and human unity/brotherhood (49:13) recur across mainstream sources. The honest tension points — apostasy law, gender equality, and historical slavery — are where Khan’s optimism outruns the classical juristic record and must be treated critically.

Details

Introduction and Author Background

Al-Hajj Sir Chaudhri Muhammad Zafrulla Khan (6 February 1893 – 1985) was among the most internationally decorated Muslim jurists of the twentieth century, and the biographical claims in the task are all verifiable. Born in Sialkot (in present-day Pakistan), he studied at Government College, Lahore, and took his LL.B. from King’s College, London, being called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn (1914). He practiced law in Sialkot and Lahore, joined the Punjab Legislative Council (1926), attended all three Round Table Conferences on Indian reforms (1930–32), served as President of the All-India Muslim League (1931–32), sat on the Viceroy’s Executive Council (1935–41), led the Indian delegation to the League of Nations (1939), and was a judge of the Federal Court of India (1941–47). He was knighted in 1935.

Upon Partition he became Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister (1947) and led its UN delegation (1947–54). He then served as a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague (1954–61), returned to represent Pakistan at the UN (1961–64), served as President of the UN General Assembly’s 17th session (1962–63), and finally returned to the ICJ, serving as its President from 1970 to 1973. He was also a prominent member and scholar of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community — a detail that is not incidental. His lifelong advocacy for freedom of conscience was forged partly in defending the Ahmadis’ contested claim to be Muslims in colonial India; Project MUSE notes that the very arguments he had developed to reject temporal punishment for changing belief were “the same arguments … which Zafrulla would repeat during the debates on Article 18 of the UDHR.” His other works include Islam: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1962), a translation of the Qur’an (1970), and Woman in Islam. themuslimtimes

This biography matters to the review because it makes Islam and Human Rights something rare: a defense of the compatibility of Islam and international human rights written not by an academic theorist but by a man who helped draft, debate, adjudicate, and vote on the very instruments in question.

Overview and Structure of the Book

The book is short — roughly 140 pages in its common editions (ISBN 978-1-85372-040-6; also issued by the London Mosque and by Islam International Publications) — and was first published in 1967, with numerous later editions through 2016. Its architecture is straightforward and pedagogically effective:

Introduction framing the UDHR historically and morally.
A statement of Islamic first principles relevant to rights — the concept of ma’roof (that which is good, equitable, desirable), the duty of every Muslim to promulgate such values, human stewardship, and divine accountability.
A clause-by-clause treatment of the Preamble and all thirty articles, each linked to scripture.
An optimistic conclusion arguing that Muslim decline stemmed from neglecting Qur’anic teaching, and that a revival closely adhering to those teachings is under way.

The publisher’s framing — that the text shows Islam’s “distinct superiority” over the Declaration’s articles — is more triumphalist than Khan’s own prose, which is generally measured. This gap between marketing and text is itself worth flagging for readers.

The Book’s Arguments, Thematically

On the meaning and status of the Declaration. Khan opens with genuine eloquence, calling the Declaration not a “law” in the juristic sense but “a shining milestone” on humanity’s long path “towards the goal of freedom, justice and equality.” As a working international lawyer he is precise about the UDHR’s non-binding character while insisting on its moral weight, ranking it “with the great historical documents and Charters directed towards the same objective.” He then poses the book’s animating moral question — how, after two world wars “and in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” man “continues to be the victim of discrimination, intolerance and cruelty at the hands of his fellow man” — and answers that “the prosperity of all is promoted through mutual sharing and co-operation rather than through the exploitation and domination of some by others.” themuslimtimes themuslimtimes

On method. Khan’s disciplined caveat — that Islam supplies “broad values and standards” rather than verbatim provisions — is the book’s intellectual high point. It inoculates him against the charge of forcing anachronistic readings onto scripture and lets him argue at the level of principle: human dignity, equality before the law, protection of life and property, freedom of conscience, economic solidarity, and due process.

On rights as duties. A recurring and distinctive move is Khan’s reframing of “rights” as obligations. Where the UDHR is written in the grammar of entitlement, Khan tends to render each right as a corresponding Qur’anic duty — the duty to give (zakat and charity), the duty to do justice, the duty to protect the weak, the duty to promulgate ma’roof. This is both a strength (it roots rights in a transcendent moral order rather than shifting political consensus) and a limitation (a right framed as another’s duty may be weaker, in practice, than a right the holder can independently claim and enforce).

Insights from the thequran.love Review Article

The review article specified by the user — “Book Review: Islam and Human Rights by Sir Zafrulla Khan,” by Zia H. Shah, MD, Chief Editor of The Muslim Times, published 31 August 2026 on The Glorious Quran and Science (thequran.love), and previously carried by The Muslim Times — is essentially a laudatory précis rather than a critical evaluation. Its most useful contributions to this review are:

It confirms Khan “played an important role in the development of the 30 Articles” and “saw numerous parallels” between the Qur’an and the Declaration.
It distills Khan’s thesis to a memorable formulation: “In his view Islam was about human rights and creating a compassionate and just society should be a constant goal of each Muslim.” The Muslim Times
It preserves three of the book’s most quotable passages (the “shining milestone” introduction, the post-war lament, and the ma’roof gloss on the Preamble), which are valuable because the full text is not readily machine-readable online.
It reproduces the Encyclopædia Britannica biographical entry, which independently corroborates every职 office attributed to Khan.

The article’s limitation — which a fair review should note — is that it is written from within the Ahmadiyya tradition and offers no critical distance. It does not engage the apostasy, gender, or slavery tensions at all, and it inherits the publisher’s “superiority” framing uncritically. It is a reliable guide to what the book says and to Khan’s biography, but not to how contemporary human-rights scholarship assesses the book’s claims.

The History of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

The UDHR emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War and the Holocaust, when it became clear that the UN Charter’s general references to human rights required concrete definition. The UN Commission on Human Rights, established in 1946 and meeting first in 1947, comprised eighteen members from varied political, cultural, and religious backgrounds. The core drafting figures were:

Eleanor Roosevelt (United States), widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who chaired the Commission and the drafting committee and is widely credited as the “driving force” behind adoption; she called the document humanity’s “Magna Carta.” britannica
John Peters Humphrey (Canada), Director of the UN Secretariat’s Human Rights Division, who compiled a roughly 400-page survey of the world’s rights traditions and authored the very first draft (the “blueprint”).
René Cassin (France), the jurist who revised Humphrey’s draft into a structured document; long regarded as the “father of the Declaration,” he likened it to a Greek temple with foundation, columns, and pediment, and drew on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789).
Charles Habib Malik (Lebanon), the philosopher-diplomat who served as Commission Rapporteur and chaired the Third Committee; a forceful advocate for fundamental freedoms, including the right to change one’s belief. EBSCO
Peng-chun (P.C.) Chang (China), Vice-Chairman, a playwright-philosopher who injected Confucian perspectives and brokered compromises, famously suggesting the Secretariat “spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism.”

Other delegates left their mark — Chile’s Hernán Santa Cruz pressed for social and economic rights, and India’s Hansa Mehta insisted on gender-inclusive language.

After the Third Committee devoted eighty-one meetings to the draft and considered nearly seventy amendments, the General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the UDHR as Resolution 217 A (III) on 10 December 1948 (now Human Rights Day). The vote was 48 in favour, none against, and 8 abstentions, with two members not voting. The eight abstaining states were the six Soviet-bloc countries (the USSR, the Byelorussian SSR, the Ukrainian SSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia), South Africa (over the equality provisions, given apartheid), and Saudi Arabia.

The Pakistan–Saudi Arabia divide is the hinge of the story for this book. Saudi Arabia’s delegate, Jamil Baroody, objected chiefly to Article 18’s clause on the freedom “to change his religion or belief,” calling it a product of Western thinking incompatible with the Shari’a. Sir Zafrulla Khan, representing Pakistan, voted in favour and rose to defend Article 18 on explicitly Islamic grounds. According to the scholarship of Amjad Mahmood Khan (2023), it was “a Muslim from Pakistan — Sir Zafrulla Khan — who had come to the defense of the Christian missionary movement … and in so doing, had provided a Qur’anic defense of the human right of a Muslim to leave Islam and become a Christian without fear of punishment,” thereby “single-handedly prevent[ing] any Muslim-majority nation from rejecting the Declaration.” Khan told the Assembly that Pakistan “was an ardent defender of freedom of thought and belief,” and that for his delegation the issue “involved the honor of Islam.” Eleanor Roosevelt, in her own recollection, paraphrased the Qur’anic logic she had absorbed — that belief cannot be coerced and “the only unforgivable sin is to be a hypocrite” — before casting her vote. The OHCHR confirms that Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all voted for the Declaration while Saudi Arabia abstained. Taylor & Francis Online

Legacy. Though legally non-binding, the UDHR became the foundation of the International Bill of Human Rights (with the two 1966 Covenants), has influenced the majority of national constitutions drafted since 1948, and is the touchstone against which later instruments — including the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which subordinates rights to the Shari’a and notably lacks an unqualified right to change religion — are measured. Khan’s book, written in 1967, sits squarely in this legacy as an early, insider argument that the universalist project and Islam are natural allies rather than rivals.

Executive Summary of the 30 UDHR Articles Mapped to Qur’anic/Islamic Teaching

The mapping below synthesizes Khan’s method (correlating each article to Qur’anic values and Prophetic practice) with corroborating scholarship. Where the text and tradition are in genuine tension, this is stated plainly rather than smoothed over. Verse citations follow the standard numbering used across the sources consulted; Ahmadi editions (including Khan’s own) sometimes number a verse one higher because they count the Bismillah as verse 1 (e.g., “49:13” appears as “49:14” in Khan’s usage).

Foundational dignity and equality (Articles 1–2).

Art. 1 (free and equal in dignity, endowed with reason and conscience, to act in brotherhood): Grounded in the honoring of “the children of Adam” (17:70), creation “from a single soul” (4:1), and the brotherhood of humankind made into “tribes … that you may recognize one another” (49:13). The Prophet’s Farewell Sermon (632 CE) — declaring no superiority of Arab over non-Arab except by righteousness — is widely regarded as an early charter of human equality.
Art. 2 (non-discrimination): The only distinction God recognizes is piety (49:13), which Khan reads as a categorical rejection of race, color, and class hierarchy.

Life, liberty, and bodily integrity (Articles 3–5).

Art. 3 (life, liberty, security): The sanctity of life — to kill one soul unjustly is as to kill all humanity (5:32).
Art. 4 (no slavery): Tension point treated honestly. The Qur’an strongly encourages manumission (e.g., freeing a slave as expiation, 90:13) and Islam is credited with emancipating the oppressed, but classical law regulated rather than abolished slavery. Khan reads the trajectory of the texts as anti-slavery in spirit; the fairer historical statement, echoed by modern scholars, is that all Muslim-majority states have since outlawed slavery, aligning practice with that spirit rather than with medieval fiqh.
Art. 5 (no torture or cruel punishment): Justice tempered by mercy and the command not to transgress limits (2:190; 16:90). Critics note the Qur’an also prescribes fixed corporal hudud penalties (e.g., 5:38; 24:2); Khan emphasizes mercy, reform, and the extremely high evidentiary bars classical law imposed.

Legal personhood and due process (Articles 6–11).

Arts. 6–8 (recognition before the law, equality before the law, effective remedy): Every person as a moral agent and steward (khalifah, 2:30; 17:70) is a bearer of rights; equal standing follows from equal creation.
Arts. 9–11 (no arbitrary arrest, fair and public hearing, presumption of innocence): Anchored in the Qur’an’s insistence on scrupulous justice and truthful testimony “even against yourselves” (4:135) and justice toward those you dislike (5:8) — verses Khan treats as the ethical core of due process.

Privacy, movement, asylum, nationality, family (Articles 12–16).

Art. 12 (privacy, honor): The prohibitions on spying and backbiting and the protection of honor (e.g., 49:12).
Arts. 13–15 (freedom of movement, asylum, nationality): The precedent of the hijra to Abyssinia — the Prophet’s companions granted refuge — is the classic Islamic asylum narrative Khan and others invoke.
Art. 16 (marriage and family): Tension point. Khan defends marriage as a consensual union and family as society’s foundation, but classical rules on interfaith marriage, testimony, and divorce differ by gender, and Khan (as in his Woman in Islam) frames gender differences as complementary roles rather than inequality — a reading many contemporary human-rights scholars regard as insufficient on strict equality grounds.

Freedom of conscience, expression, and association (Articles 18–20).

Art. 18 (freedom of thought, conscience, religion, including the right to change belief): The book’s centerpiece and Khan’s personal legacy. “There shall be no compulsion in religion” (2:256) is the anchor. Tension point treated honestly: classical jurisprudence in several schools historically prescribed the death penalty for apostasy, and thirteen-plus states retain penal or civil apostasy sanctions. Khan’s position — that Islam guarantees complete freedom of conscience and permits no temporal punishment for changing belief — is a reformist reading, powerful and text-supported (2:256; the Abyssinian refuge; “he who can believe shall believe; he who cannot shall disbelieve”) but not the majority classical position. A fair review must present both: Khan’s is the more humane and, arguably, more Qur’anically faithful reading, but it was and remains contested within the tradition.
Arts. 19–20 (expression; peaceful assembly and association): The duty of enjoining good (ma’roof) and consultation (shura, 42:38; 3:159).

Political and economic-social rights (Articles 21–27).

Art. 21 (participation in government): Shura as the Qur’anic principle of consultative governance.
Arts. 22–26 (social security, work, rest, adequate standard of living, education): Here Khan is at his most persuasive. The Qur’anic institution of zakat, the repeated command to give “the rightful share of their wealth to the beggar and the deprived” (51:19), and the state’s duty to support the poor make the Declaration’s economic and social rights feel like native Islamic commitments rather than foreign impositions. The strong Islamic emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge undergirds Article 26’s right to education.
Art. 27 (cultural life): Read through the Qur’an’s affirmation of the diversity of peoples as a divine sign.

Order, duties, and limits (Articles 28–30).

Art. 28 (a just social and international order): Khan’s internationalism — grounded in his ICJ and UN service — finds a natural home here.
Art. 29 (duties to community; limits on rights): This is where Khan’s rights-as-duties framing is most at home; the Qur’anic balance of individual freedom against communal responsibility maps closely onto Article 29’s structure.
Art. 30 (no right to destroy others’ rights): Consonant with the Qur’anic prohibition on transgressing limits.

Preamble: Khan reads the Preamble’s appeal to conscience, dignity, and freedom from fear and want as an echo of Islam’s duty to promulgate ma’roof, “that which is good, equitable, desirable.”

Critical Assessment

Islam and Human Rights succeeds on its own terms and deserves its standing as a landmark of twentieth-century Muslim engagement with international law, but a candid review must register both its virtues and its limits.

Strengths. First, provenance: no other book on the subject is written by someone who helped make, argue, adjudicate, and vote on the UDHR. Second, clarity and concision: at ~140 pages it is accessible to non-specialists while remaining textually grounded. Third, genuine parallels: the convergences Khan identifies — dignity (17:70), impartial justice (4:135, 5:8), non-compulsion (2:256), universal brotherhood (49:13), and economic solidarity (zakat, 51:19) — are not strained; they are affirmed across a broad, independent literature. Fourth, the courage of the underlying stance: Khan’s insistence, at real professional and personal risk as an Ahmadi, that freedom to change one’s religion is “fundamental” to Islam was historically consequential and remains morally admirable.

Weaknesses. First, the book is apologetic rather than analytical: it aims to demonstrate harmony (and, in the publisher’s framing, “superiority”), not to test it. Counter-texts and the classical juristic record on apostasy, gender, and slavery are underplayed. Second, its rights-as-duties reframing, while theologically rich, can obscure the enforceability gap between an entitlement and someone else’s obligation. Third, Khan speaks for “Islam” in the singular, largely eliding the diversity of schools and the reality that his reformist readings — especially on apostasy — are minority positions in classical fiqh; readers unfamiliar with intra-Islamic debate may mistake his interpretation for consensus. Fourth, the book is dated (1967): it predates the Cairo Declaration (1990), the maturation of international human-rights law, and decades of scholarship on Islam and rights, and it cannot engage them.

On balance, the book is best classified as authoritative advocacy: indispensable as a primary document of how a leading Muslim jurist-statesman understood the compatibility question, and genuinely illuminating on the textual parallels — but to be supplemented, not treated as the last word, on the contested questions.

To read the book:

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