Islamic legal philosophy and moral rights

Abstract

Moral rights have well-established theoretical justifications in Western philosophical taught. Western moral and political philosophy influenced the global recognition and development of moral rights protection. In the Islamic world, copyright legislation copied European norms of moral rights, and academic commentaries made little effort to provide theoretical justifications for moral rights protection from an Islamic perspective. This chapter takes up this task in two steps. First, it shows that Islamic legal philosophy offers normative theories that recognize moral rights as a fair reward for intellectual efforts and as rights compatible with human nature to possess external objects. Second, the chapter shows that despite the lack of formal recognition for moral rights in the history of Islamic law, Muslim authors extensively practised ethics of authorship akin to the underlying ethics of moral rights as we know them today. They documented their belief in religious duty to respect the moral rights to attribution and integrity in both religious and non-religious literature.