Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics

Mayer, a legal expert at the Wharton School, has written a quiet but scathing attack on the notion that cultural relativism applies to human rights. She does so by comparing the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, plus associated documents, with a selection of its self-styled Islamic equivalents: the 1979 Iranian constitution, a 1979 proposal of the Islamic Research Academy in Cairo, the 1981 Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, as well as schemes forwarded by such intellectuals as Sultan Husayn Tabanda and Abu'l A'la Mawdudi.

The result is sheer devastation. Mayer exposes the Muslim efforts as only tenuously connected to Islam and uninterested in individual freedom. "Instead, they accord priority to rationalizing governmental repression, protecting and promoting social cohesion, and perpetuating traditional hierarchies in society, which means discriminatory treatment of women and non-Muslims." Dissidents and human rights campaigners invariably dismiss the watered-down "Islamic" alternatives as tools of repression and look to the universal codes as inspiration.

But not so Western academics who, Mayer charges, consider a critical evaluation of this topic "off limits" in the belief that it promotes Western biases and impedes the understanding of a foreign society. Not only does this condescending attitude condemn Muslim populations to live under regimes whose human rights records range from "the mediocre to the atrocious"; it also allies those academics with dictators, their security services, and their legal flaks. With the appearance of this brave book, let us hear no more about Islamic exceptionalism to the universal norms of human rights.

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