A Comparative Scrutiny of the Human Rights of Women in Islamic and International Laws

• Applicant: Dr. Salar Abbasi, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Public Law ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 577776066

The proposed project delves into a globally pressing concern: the situation of the human rights of women in Islamic societies. Around the world, millions of women live at the intersection of Islamic and international legal systems. Yet the relationship between these diverse heritages of legal thought is often misunderstood or politically charged. This project takes a novel scholarly approach to this issue, with a structure based upon two pillars. Firstly, it begins by exploring how women's human rights are interpreted within the Islamic law through a deep scrutiny in the jurisprudence of Islam, as well as various scholarly debates and schools of interpretation of Islamic laws. The project aims to offer a jurisprudentially informed scrutiny that avoids politically or ideologically biased analysis. Secondly, the project delves into the human rights of women in international law, with a special focus on international co-development multistakeholderism—which emphasizes inclusive co-projection of reforms among states-actors, civil society, and international organizations. The grounding theory to inform these co-development partnerships is the ‘experimentalist’ theory of change that builds on the iterative adaptation of legal norms and institutions in response to complex sociopolitical challenges, emphasizing learning, dialogue, and incremental transformation within transnational governance while resisting imperialist impositions. The proposed project also aims to evaluate if these co-development international multistakeholder partnerships are legitimate from the perspective of Islam. The objective is to produce a jurisprudentially rooted and globally relevant contribution to the amelioration of the human rights of women in Islamic societies and contexts, in order to raise awareness both within academia and among public policymakers. The final result of the proposed project will fill a critical gap in Islamic and international scholarship by offering the first comprehensive and legally grounded jurisprudential analysis from within Islamic law on the normative legitimacy of co-development multistakeholder partnerships as mechanisms for advancing women’s human rights in Islamic societies and contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants