Islam and Justice: Debating the Future of Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (review)

Islam and Justice: Debating the Future of Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa chronicles discussions during a symposium in England on human rights problems in the Middle East and North Africa and includes several background papers written by participants. Particularly interesting are lively confrontations between advocates of human rights and proponents of political Islam. The Lawyers Committee has rendered a valuable service by setting up this encounter and disseminating the record of the provocative debates.

The papers and discussions will afford readers a chance to peruse the unfiltered opinions of Muslims adhering to divergent trends and to appraise where the conversation currently stands. Unfortunately, the interesting and diverse array of spokespersons for human rights, which includes several Westerners, confronts a much smaller Islamist contingent. Due to factors such as resentment over the Western tendency to harp on human rights abuses perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists, while downplaying abuses under secular regimes, many Islamists would be wary of participating in any forum organized by a US based human rights organization like the Lawyers Committee. A few relatively moderate Islamists did contribute—the most prominent being the well-known leader of the formerly potent Tunisian Nahda movement, Rached al-Ghannouchi, who now lives in exile in England. Unfortunately, Ghannouchi did not participate in the second part of the symposium, so the exchanges with him are truncated.

Whether political Islam and human rights can coexist is a momentous question. Both enjoy widespread appeal among the disaffected populace in the Middle East and North Africa, where alternative schemes of legitimacy quite naturally surface as mechanisms for challenging the oppression of entrenched elites. Both Islam and human rights are used by Muslims in these regions to critique the injustices of the existing orders and to propose how to restructure polities based on sounder values. Analysts differ as to whether Islamic movements and human rights activism, which have often been at loggerheads, are destined to be always competing—even hostile—forces, or whether there are commonalities that could open the way to a fruitful alliance between the two. To date, the facts that human rights have been egregiously violated by supposedly “Islamic” regimes, and that human rights activists have sharply criticized Islamist movements for their deficient human rights policies, have engendered mutual suspicions and recriminations. Still, each of these two opposition forces has indirectly paid tribute to the authority enjoyed by the other. Human rights NGOs have tried to incorporate Islamic elements in their appeals and to institute dialogue with Islamists, and Islamists have tried to coopt human rights in the form of “Islamic” human rights, which purport to offer indigenous models of rights that are respectful of religious traditions. The interpenetration of Islamist and human rights discourse that surfaces in these discussions is a phenomenon worth monitoring.

Because they are significantly outnumbered in the discussions recorded here, the Islamists have difficulty parrying the challenges brought by the numerous articulate and assertive Muslim professionals and activists in the human rights contingent. The two groups often talk past each other, revealing their dissimilar priorities. One side touts its ultimate objectives; the other side fusses over details of due process. Islamists prefer to speak in terms of broad goals—such as justice and morality—as they promote their utopian visions of the perfect society that will (automatically) ensue once Islamic law is in place. They seem uninterested in issues of process. Exactly how their Islamic government would operate and how it would avoid replicating current problems in countries like Iran and the Sudan are left unexplained. The young Egyptian Islamist Heba Raouf Ezzat calls for progress in the Islamic community—“not to match international standards necessarily, but to match what I believe is just and fair.” ¹ That is, in lieu of concrete human rights measures she offers personal goals defined by totally subjective criteria. Ghannouchi speaks vaguely of “general principles, general values” of human rights being inherent...