On Jan. 20, 2009, Serife Yigit, mother of six, who had married her husband in 1976 in a private religious ceremony rather than a civil service, had applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), saying that she should be entitled to the retirement and other social benefits of her late husband, who died in 2002. But the ECtHR declined her application. Yigit then appealed this at the Grand Chamber, which ratified the decision on Nov. 2, 2010, concluding that Turkey was not in breach of Article 14 on the prohibition of discrimination and Article 8 on the right to respect for ones private and family life of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In short, according to the court, Yigit and her six children were not entitled to any rights due to her religious marriage. You may also recall that the ECtHR also declined the applications about the closure of the Welfare Party (RP), the headscarf decision and some other claims about Islam. It should be noted that the courts decision was in harmony with the spirit of the convention. The court generally declines Muslims claims, and the factors that urge the court to hand down such decisions are not double standards or biased compared to its decisions concerning the practitioners of other religions. This is the misconception of many people in Turkey, and even they believe that the Turkish member of the ECtHR influenced the courts decision concerning Leyla Sahin. This is a misguided assessment. Let us try to understand why this is so by looking at other examples. Almost all countries in the Middle East, stuffed with autocratic or dictatorial regimes, are exerting heavy political pressure on their citizens. For instance, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, or Al-Ikhwan, is detained, but his family is not informed and the detainee does not know why he is detained. The detention period is not as short as three or five days, but actually lasts for five or six years. Somehow, he is referred to the court and the judge asks why he was detained but his detention could not be justified, so he is finally released. Then this guy returns home, but merely a week later another intelligence agency comes and takes him away. He is detained for several more years. This continues in this way. No one can object to this practice. In this respect, Europeans and Westerners in general are deaf and blind. They never hear about or see such practices. But if a liberal, a leftist or a nationalist were to be taken into custody, they would immediately spring to action, slamming autocratic regimes and producing much anti-Islamic propaganda. There is also the tendency by the Western media to report incidents in the Muslim world in a distorted or incomplete manner. For instance, they propagandize that a woman will be ruthlessly and brutally killed as a penalty for her adultery, but they wont report that the same woman cooperated with her lover to have her husband killed. Both the ECtHR and other human rights organisations ambitiously advocate the rights and freedoms of, for instance, illegitimate sexual intercourse (adultery) by single, widowed or married peoples, those living in common-law marriages, apostates, conscientious objectors, homosexuals, marginal groups, aggressive feminists and atheists, but they are cool toward claims referring to Islam. The reason for this is completely historical and philosophical. They have to do with the definition of human beings formulated during the Enlightenment. In my article dated Nov. 5, 2010, I argued that for a claim or an act to be considered within the scope of rights or freedoms from the European perspective, it must been based on based on 'being a man, which is indicated not by mans 'compliance to religious duties but his omission of them. Accordingly, the religion or particularly to Islam, then you are deemed to have no right or freedom from a legal perspective, but you may be shown only tolerance. Tolerance is left to the mercy of people and is not under constitutional or legal guarantees. This will lead us to either to, (i) seek tolerance or fairness from Westerners, or (ii) jettison certain provisions of our religion, or (ii) develop a more comprehensive philosophy of rights and freedoms. Recently Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, The Western Enlightenment has said whatever it can say. Thus, the West has said whatever it can say about human rights and freedoms. We need new intellectual and philosophical resources. And Islam offers us a wealth of possibilities in this respect. Today's Zaman