ABSTRACT

Assessment shows that Islamic human rights schemes, although invoking Islamic tradition, are actually shaped by their authors' negative reactions to ideas of freedom and democracy and to the scope of rights protections afforded by the International Bill of Human Rights. With the heavy investments of states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia in promoting Islamic human rights schemes, they inevitably reflect the attitudes of regimes that are fundamentally hostile to human rights. A striking aspect of professedly "Islamic" human rights schemes is their hybridity, which disproves any notion that they represent pure outflowings of the Islamic tradition. From an array of options in the Islamic heritage that include principles friendly to rights, the schemes deliberately select those elements that present obstacles to the accommodation of international human rights law. The merit of the transitional human rights formulations could be that human rights, introduced gradually and conditionally, might avoid excessive clashes with familiar Islamic strictures.