ABSTRACT
The goal of the human rights movement to formulate a jurisprudence of rights valid for all of humanity is considered laudable by some, offensive to others. This chapter briefly summarizes the main areas in which human rights commentators have portrayed a tension between Islamic Law and human rights norms. It explores the three most common theories which have been propagated on the question of the universality of human rights—universalism, strict cultural relativism, and moderate cultural relativism—concluding that none of these offers a satisfactory analysis of the issue. The chapter notes that, just as the American Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement in the 1970s criticized the tacit acceptance of the oppressor view as neutral, the same critique could be made of the existing theories on the universality of human rights. It proposes a new theory, reverse moderate relativism, which offers a superior way to conceptualize the universality question by focusing on local norms instead of maintaining an international bias.
