The main purpose of this article is to display a plurality of Muslim positions in the area of human rights. Like other religions or cultures, Islam is a complex reality harboring various, and frequently conflicting, interpretations about its inherent normative demands. Such diverse interpretations also emerge in the field of human rights. As the title of this article suggests, there is not one binding Islamic position but rather a great variety of "Muslim voices" offering different views about whether and how the idea of human rights and Islamic normative requirements fit together.2 This article can, at the same time, be read as an exploration of the relationship between the universal claims of human rights on the one hand and the traditional values rooted in a particular culture on the other. It seems beyond question that many tensions between traditional Islamic norms and international human rights standards exist. No one can predict whether and how they will be settled in the future. However, because all cultures and

Muslim Voices in the Human Rights Debate

Gianluca P. Parolin deed vijf jaar lang onderzoek naar burgerschap in het Midden-Oosten. In dit boek plaatst de auteur dit begrip in een breder juridisch perspectief naar de maatstaven van de complexe realiteit van nationaliteit en burgerschap. Wetten op het gebied van nationaliteit zijn vaak gebaseerd op staten en worden als volledig soeverein beschouwd. Maar deze wetten zijn alleen effectief als rekening gehouden wordt met de culturele en juridische achtergrond van de burgers waarop ze van toepassing zijn.

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Citizenship in the Arab World: Kin, Religion and Nation-State

The scale and variety of acts of religious intolerance evident in so many countries today are of enormous contemporary concern. This 2005 study attempts a thorough and systematic treatment of both Universal and European practice. The standards applicable to freedom of religion are subjected to a detailed critique, and their development and implementation within the UN is distinguished from that within Strasbourg, in order to discern trends and obstacles to their advancement and to highlight the rationale for any apparent departures between the two systems. This dual focus also demonstrates the acute need for the European Court to heed the warnings from various patterns of violation throughout the world illustrated by the Human Rights Committee and the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief.

Freedom of Religion: UN and European Human Rights Law and Practice

Some anthropologists criticize United Nations "universal" human rights as ethnocentrically Western. But all sociocultural groups define some concept analogous to human rights, and multiple political and philosophical cultures have contributed to the evolving UN framework. This essay traces the four major sources of modern human rights (Western political liberalism, socialism and social welfare principles, cross-cultural rights traditions, and the UN instruments) and focuses on points of agreement in the evolving framework. The evidence is used to argue for a pluralist approach to human rights (rather than narrower universal, Western, or broader cultural relativist approaches) and suggests points for additional anthropological contributions.

Pluralist Approaches to Human Rights

ways. He maintains that you arrive at these universals not by abstract reasoning 65 Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Theological Ethics, The Churches and Global Politics,” in Journal of Religious Ethics, 35. 3: 377399, here 392. 66 See his book, The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 67 Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Theological Ethics, The Churches and Global Politics,” 392. 68 David Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, XIV.

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Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina

Papers

Human Rights and the Conflict of Cultures: Western and Islamic Perspectives on Religious Liberty