Muslim scholar touts Marrakesh Declaration on rights of religious minorities in bid to win war of ideas against ISIS

The Marrakesh Declaration on the Rights of Religious Minorities in Predominantly Muslim Majority Communities will help the liberal interpretation of Islam prevail in the “market of ideas” amid increasing violence in the Middle East led by the Islamic State, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Muslim scholar Aziza al Hibri said Tueday at the National Press Club.

McCarrick, the former Archbishop of Washington, and al-Hibri, the first female Muslim professor to achieve tenure at a U.S. law school and a former University of Richmond law professor, are among the more than 250 Muslim and non-Muslim religious leaders who earlier this year convened in Morocco to write the Marrakesh Declaration, which delineates the rights of religious minorities in Islamic countries.

The document “calls upon representatives of the various religions, sects and denominations to confront all forms of religious bigotry, vilification, and denigration of what people hold sacred, as well as all speech that promote hatred and bigotry.”

Based on the 622 Charter of Medina, the Muslim world’s first constitution, the Marrakesh Declaration affirms that “it is unconscionable to employ religion for the purpose of aggressing upon the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.”

Al-Hibri said the declaration is a bid to counter the Islamic State and other fundamentalist organizations that have persecuted groups such as the Yazidis in Iraq.

“ISIL has prepared a Charter of Medina for their city of Raqqa, and it has nothing of the principles we’re talking about, but is designed to confuse people, and suggest to them that they’re doing something based in Islam. That’s how important the Charter of Medina is. We cannot let it be co-opted, and stolen and used to confuse Muslim communities about what the fundamentals of Islam are,” she said.

Audience member Rasha Elass, who said she met jihadists in Syria while covering the civil war, noted ISIS’ sheiks legitimate credentials as Islamic scholars. She asked whether followers of ISIS would be interested in the the document's message or if it simply appeals to like-minded people.

“It appears that those people who can speak in the language of say the declaration of Marrakesh, these people are being killed very rapidly,” al-Hibri responded. “The problem is not that there are bad ideas and good ideas. The problem is that somebody thought that he is the final arbiter on Earth. Not God, but this scholar, or his people, or some militant people who think they can take the life that God has given us. That is the problem.”

McCarrick asked the audience to help ensure that the document is widely distributed.

“Do not let this become a dead document,” he said. “If this is the true Islam, as our scholars tell us it is, then we can easily work together, and easily make a new world.”