Liberal Islam and 'Islam and human rights': A sceptic's view

Religion and Human Rights

Volumn 1, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 145-163

  Chase, Anthony ^a  

^a OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 84856347267     PISSN: 1871031X     EISSN: 18710328     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/187103206778884866     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. See Chase & Hamzawy (eds.), Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices (University of Pennsylvania Press, Pittsburgh, 2006). Note chapters by Carapico on Yemen, Waltz & Benstead on Morocco and, more generally, Megally
2. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford University Press, New York, 2004).
3. Khaled abu el Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (HarperCollins, New York, 2005).
4. See Abdolkarim al-Soroush, Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam (Oxford University Press, New York, 2000).
5. Also, Anthony Chase, 'Islam and Democracy' in David Lesch (ed.), History in Dispute: The Middle East Since 1945 (St. James Press, Farmington Hills, 2003).
6. Jean Baudrillard, 'Interview with Nathan Gardels' (spring 1992) 9, 2 New Perspectives Quarterly.
7. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (Times Books, New York, 1995).
8. Fuad Zakariya (July-August 1993) 183 Middle East Report.
9. Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1990), 9-10.
10. Abdullahi an-Naim, 'Islam and Human Rights: Beyond the Universality Debate', (2000) ASIL Proceedings, p. 95.
11. Nathan Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997). Without delving into Islamic legal history, it is important to note that it has a decentralised form and throughout its history it is rare that the state has been its arbiter.
12. Those claiming to apply the Shari'a in its totality-such as the Taliban did in Afghanistan- do so in a politicized, distorted manner, as when women are executed for walking without a male escort. Shari 'a-justified acts such as this have more to do with local customary practices or hierarchies of power than any historically recognized conception of the Shari 'a. Regarding human rights violations by the Taliban, see Physicians for Human Rights, The Taliban's War on Women: A Health and Human Rights Crisis (Physicians for Human Rights, Boston, 1998).
13. For one example of the variations in Muslim family law, or Personal Status Law, see Fati Ziai, 'Personal Status Codes and Women's Rights in the Maghreb' in Mahnaz Afhami & Erika Friedl (eds.), Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation: Implementing the Beijing Platform (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1997).
14. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, "Islam and Human Rights: Different Issues, Different Contexts. Lessons from Comparisons," in Tore Lindholm and Kari Vogt (eds.), Islamic Law Reform and Human Rights: Challenges and Rejoinders (Nordic Human Rights Publications, Copenhagen, 1992).
15. Reuters, 2 November, 1998. See also Steve Liebman, 'Driven to Distraction, Saudi Women May Soon Take the Wheel', Wall Street Journal, 1 March 1999, 1.
16. Reza Afshari, 'An Essay on Islamic Cultural Relativism in the Discourse of Human Rights' (May 1994) 16, 2 Human Rights Quarterly p. 245. LaRoui puts this distinction is slightly different terms when he speaks of the "confusion between religious reform and political revolution.,"
17. Abdallah LaRoui, 'Western Orientalism and Liberal Islam: Mutual Distrust?' (July 1997) 31, 1 MESA Bulletin p. 10. As the transcript of a speech, LaRoui's thoughts in this piece are necessarily elliptical. It is, however, extraordinarily rich and suggestive. Liberalism expressed in religious terms as deism, secularism, individualism, moralism, may well be shallow and weak, and it may lose every battle in the classroom- in the "Madrasa" I should say-and still triumph outside, in the marketplace." This is the distinction, according to LaRoui, between "topical reforms without touching the dogma" and "a situation in which society is set free to operate according to its own rules." Despite the denials of Islamists, Orientalists, and liberal Islamic reformers, underlying sociological realities are ultimately more fundamental than religious norms. If a political society engages in free debate on its own future according to "its own rules," and not distorted by authoritarian governments, these realities will determine political choice more than reactive, defensive and artificial nationalisms.
18. See Alison Dundes Renteln, International Human Rights: Universalism versus Relativism (Sage, Newbury Park, 1990)
19. and Adamantia Pollis, 'Towards a New Universalism: Reconstruction and Dialogue' (March 1998) 16, 1 Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights pp. 5-23. These represent cultural relativist perspectives that also insist that Islam is the defining factor in Muslim societies and, therefore, in conflict with the alternative' norms of human rights. (Pubitemid 128043413)
20. Popularity is, of course, hard to judge in states without elections or some form of popular representation. In those Muslim states that have held fair elections, Islamist parties have usually remained a relatively small minority. In Turkey, Welfare and Justice and Development did win pluralities, but is not an Islamist nationalist party (it is more akin to a European Christian Democrat party) and, in any case, has never won more than 35% of the popular vote-and this in a country whose other major parties have been continuously embroiled in corruption scandals. Algeria is the only case where an Islamic party swept an election, but polls showed that even among its supporters only half were in favor of an Islamic state being established. In the Palestinian Authority, Hamas recently won a plurality and came to power on the basis of divisions in the Fatah vote. Polls showed this was not based on positive support for an Islamicizing agenda (from which Hamas distanced itself during the campaign), but rather a negative blowback against Fatah corruption. See also Giles Keppel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2002).
21. For example, a sampling of Amnesty International reports on three governments in the Arab-Muslim world, spanning the spectrum from secularist Syria, mixed secular-religious Egypt, and Quran as constitution Saudi Arabia show similar practices of torture by the security services of each of the three states-just as they occur in many non-Muslim states. See http://www.amnesty.org/ . Ann Mayer emphasizes the common political factors which at the heart of most human rights abuses, factors which have little to do with Islam. For her able comparative analysis, see Mayer, supra note 21, pp. 117-134. Mayer's most interesting comparison is to opposition to granting women the right to drive in the United States. As is so often true, culturalist defenses of rights violations are strikingly cross-cultural.
22. Winin Pereira, Inhuman Rights: The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse (The Other India Press, Mapusa 1997), p. ii. In the Muslim world, this distrust has led to the charge that those who invoke human rights in the face of state abuses are "anti-Islamic" or beholden to foreign, imperialist values. See, for example, the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights' Secretary General Hafez Abu Se'da's arrest in the wake of EOHR's release of a report on Egyptian state human rights abuses in the predominantly Coptic Christian village of Al-Kosheh. Of interest here is not that Se'da was arrested, but the actual charges brought against him: disseminating information harmful to Egypt's national interests and "accepting funds from a foreign country for the purpose of carrying out acts harmful to Egypt.," This is a classic example of stigmatizing oppositional ideas by ignoring their substance and taking refuge in the rhetoric of embattled cultural purity. Indirect intellectual support to the defensive protests of authoritarian regimes that human rights are a Western construct applicable only in the North American and European cultural-political context is supplied by claims such as that made by Pereira. This dodge from internal and international criticism is an obviously cynical ploy. While it may be ludicrous to rationalize, for example, electric shock torture by evoking Islamic vs. Western values, this is, in effect, what some governments and their cultural relativist defenders do.
23. Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam (Westview Press, Boulder, 1994).