ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the facial discontinuity between the Court's endorsement of religious pluralism and its legal treatment of Islam. Human rights has become the dominant moral vocabulary of modernity and achieved a particular preeminence within Europe, which as Janne Matlary notes, 'has become the major exponent of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law all over the world'. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) expressed a shift towards a civil religion of human rights having the potential to develop a European common standard beyond national specificities. The ECHR did not mention Christianity as the course of rights; instead, what mattered was adherence to the specified rights regardless of the source of those rights. The resulting moral order does not encourage the flourishing of religious pluralism because the universal and secular nomos of human rights law grants little space to strong expressions of religious particularity.
