ABSTRACT
Martin Nguyen focuses on the “stranger” as a litmus test for the Global Ethic’s call to “consider humankind our family” and for its Second Directive, “Commitment to a Culture of Solidarity and Just Economic Order.” Nguyen offers a Sunni Islamic ethical framework built around the idea of the “stranger” and “strangeness” that engages two global crises: (1) the more than 65 million people displaced by political and environmental crises and (2) the plight of those racially disenfranchised by global white supremacy. The central points of reference for this framework are two hadiths: (1) “Be in this world as if you were a stranger or somebody passing on his way” and (2) “Islam began as a stranger and it shall return just as it began as a stranger; blessedness is for the strangers.” Franklin Lewis takes up a third strand of Nguyen’s framework of strangeness: the human experience of estrangement or exile from home. He also points to documents like the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam of 1990 that defend the rights of minorities—strangers—in Middle Eastern cultures. While these documents may reference religious beliefs, Lewis argues that they are motivated at least in part by international legal standards and secular humanist values.
