Universality of rights tested by cultures : Islamic and Arab declarations on human rights

Abstract

Human rights are an important political value, which no one dares disagree with. Nowadays, it is in the name ofhuman rights that wars are justified and power-holders legitimated. Formulated originally in the West, they have become the subject of political, ideological and religious struggles involving every civilization, thus making it impossible, for any of them, not to elaborate its own vision of human rights. This need lay behind the attempts carried out in the ArabMuslim world to create a separate system of human rights. This paper first tackles the Islamic foundations of human rights. An accurate analysis of the most important Arab-Muslim documents namely: the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted by the Islamic Conference and the Arab Charter on Human Rights, adopted by League of Arab States, follows, from which we see that two opposing views emerge. They clearly express the opposition between modernists and traditionalists. The former attempts to modernize Islam, whilst the latter attempts to lslamise modernity. This controversy also involves Western society, which plays a fundamental role in the definition of Arab and Muslim identities.