Human Rights Between Universality and Islamic Legitimacy

Are concepts of human rights universal? If so, how does one reconcile them with schools of thought that Western regimes often view as hostile to universal human rights, such as Islamic fundamentalism? This question often ends in the assumption that Sharia law cannot be reconciled with human rights or that there needs to be a one-way adaption of Sharia to human rights concepts. Others view the application of human rights ideas to Sharia as an imperial intrusion.

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. He asserts that existing Islamic human rights schemes have not been able to formulate an approach that adequately balances the double requirement of universality and Islamic legitimacy, and have done little to contribute to a more profound and methodologically coherent understanding of 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.

Overall, Human Rights Between Universality and Islamic Legitimacy engages current debates on human rights in the field of political theory and offers an Islamically informed perspective, which at times substantiates, at other times challenges, orthodox understandings of human rights. As a result, Bassiouni shows how an engagement with the Islamic legal tradition can contribute to the construction of a more sound and coherent theory of human rights.