Human Rights Between Universality And Islamic Legitimacy

In Human Rights Between Universality and Islamic Legitimacy, Mahmoud Bassiouni addresses the debate surrounding the compatibility of Islam and human rights. He argues that to understand their compatibility, we need to better understand the dynamic way in which Islamic tradition has evolved relative to international human rights. Including analyses of different Muslim positions, Bassiouni identifies their merits and shortcomings and asks how we can rethink and answer open questions in human rights philosophy by bringing the resources of the Islamic tradition to bear upon them.

"Historically, the dynamics underlying contemporary Muslim human rights discourse and the related question of identity can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Faced with European superiority and aware of their own need for reform, Muslim intellectuals pondered how to explain the stagnation of Islamic societies and what initiatives were needed to bring about the desired progress. Many Muslims were troubled not only by Europe's material superiority, but also by the sense of inferiority they felt in the face of Europe's ideological defamation of Islamic societies. "Any person," wrote the French philosopher Ernest Renan in 1883, "with a modicum of instruction in the affairs of our time clearly sees the current inferiority of Muslim countries, the decadence of the states governed by Islam, the intellectual nonentity of the races that derive their culture and education solely from this religion." Thus, the idea of reform derived its impetus from an ideological challenge that saw the causes of Muslim stagnation as residing in Islam and identified the latter as inhibiting, or even blocking, the progress of Islamic societies. Accordingly, the crisis of the Muslim search for identity unfolded in response to the question of how to define oneself in relation to Europe and what role Islam should play in this regard. In a broader sense, Muslims were confronted with the basic questions of political philosophy: What principles should we live by, and where do we derive these principles from? Can the principles of a modern society be derived from Islam? Or is it necessary to refer to the ideas and institutions of Europe? To what extent can we then still define ourselves as Muslims in relation to Europe? In response to these questions, three broad currents of thought can be identified. 2.1 Trialogue of Identities Echoing the European position, a secularist school of thought believed that Muslims, by virtue of their religion, were intellectually incapable of developing progressive thought in the European sense. According to this view, Islam was fundamentally incompatible with science and modern civilization. Muslims should therefore accept European modernity as the ultimate frame of reference and assimilate to Europe as much as possible. Politically, this assimilationist stance became most prominent in Turkey. In contrast, a second, much broader current of thought, which might be called traditionalist, argued that the plight of Muslims was due to colonization and oppression by the European West. According to this view, the stagnation of Islamic societies was caused by the exercise of European imperial power, to which Muslims had fallen victim, so that adopting European ideas would be tantamount to intellectual capitulation. Rather, Muslims should seek and rediscover their strength in their own past. The only way to express one's true identity, according to this argument, is to return to one's own tradition"--

The relationship between Islam and human rights forms an important aspect of contemporary international human rights debates. Current international events have made the topic more relevant than ever in international law discourse. Professor Abdullahi An-Na'im is undoubtedly one of the leading international scholars on this subject. He has written extensively on the subject and his works are widely referenced in the literature. His contributions on the subject are however scattered in different academic journals and book chapters. This anthology is designed to bring together his academic contributions on the subject under one cover, for easy access for students and researchers in Islamic law and human rights.

In 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the International Declaration of Human Rights, a document designed to hold both individuals and nations accountable for their treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of religious or cultural affiliations. Since then, the compatibility of Islam and human rights has emerged as a particularly thorny issue of international concern, and has been addressed by Muslim rulers, conservatives, and extremists, as well as Western analysts and policymakers; all have commonly agreed that Islamic theology and human rights cannot coexist. Abdulaziz Sachedina rejects this informal consensus, arguing instead for the essential compatibility of Islam and human rights. He offers a balanced and incisive critique of Western experts who have ignored or underplayed the importance of religion to the development of human rights, contending that any theory of universal rights necessarily emerges out of particular cultural contexts. At the same time, he re-examines the juridical and theological traditions that form the basis of conservative Muslim objections to human rights, arguing that Islam, like any culture, is open to development and change. Finally, and most importantly, Sachedina articulates a fresh position that argues for a correspondence between Islam and secular notions of human rights.

This volume considers the problem of legal universals at the level of the rule of law and human rights, which have fundamentally different pedigrees, and attempts to come to terms with the new unease arising from the universal application of human rights. Given the juridicization of human rights, rule of law and human rights expectations have become significantly intertwined: human rights are enforced with the instruments of the rule of law and are thus limited by the restricted reach thereof. The first section of this volume considers the difficulties of universalistic claims and offers a number of possible solutions for adapting universal expectations to specific contexts. The second section considers problems of human rights politics; sections three and four present empirical studies about the appearance and disappearance of the rule of law and fundamental rights in Western and non-Western societies. Special attention is paid to the problems of developing countries, with a specific focus on past and present developments in Iran. These empirical studies indicate that the acceptance of human rights and the rule of law is historically contingent and cannot simply be considered as a matter of culture.

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state's monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being overambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to reestablish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens. Ignatieff begins by examining the politics of human rights, assessing when it is appropriate to use the fact of human rights abuse to justify intervention in other countries. He then explores the ideas that underpin human rights, warning that human rights must not become an idolatry. In the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, he argues that human rights can command universal assent only if they are designed to protect and enhance the capacity of individuals to lead the lives they wish. By embracing this approach and recognizing that state sovereignty is the best guarantee against chaos, Ignatieff concludes, Western nations will have a better chance of extending the real progress of the past fifty years. Throughout, Ignatieff balances idealism with a sure sense of practical reality earned from his years of travel in zones of war and political turmoil around the globe. Based on the Tanner Lectures that Ignatieff delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2000, the book includes two chapters by Ignatieff, an introduction by Amy Gutmann, comments by four leading scholars--K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher--and a response by Ignatieff.

This book compares Islamic and Western ideas of human rights in order to ascertain which human rights, if any, can be considered universal. This is a profound topic with a rich history that is highly relevant within global politics and society today. The arguments in this book are formed by bringing William Talbott’s Which Rights Should Be Universal? (2005) and Abdulaziz Sachedina’s Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2014) into conversation. By bridging the gap between cultural relativists and moral universalists, this book seeks to offer a new model for the understanding of human rights. It contends that human rights abuses are outcomes of complex systems by design and/or by default. Therefore, it proposes that a rigorous systems-thinking approach will contribute to addressing the challenge of human rights. Engaging with Islamic and Western, historical and contemporary, and relativist and universalist thought, this book is a fresh take on a perennially important issue. As such, it will be a first-rate resource for any scholars working in religious studies, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, ethics, sociology, and law and religion.

Focuses on understanding human rights as they really are and their proper role in international affairs.