ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals some of the key areas of similarity and difference between the two scholars in regard to human rights discourse. Muslims’ dominant role in the preceding civilization, and the traumatizing impact of colonialism on most Muslim-majority counties, has caused Islamic thinkers and Muslim scholars’ reactions to range widely: From nostalgic attachment to the once-dominant culture, resulting in rejecting anything modern as being un-Islamic; to full adoption of a Western worldview, resulting in fractured individual identity and conflicted national characteristics. In a sense, Sachedina is already unknowingly in conversation with Talbott. In Political Liberalism, John Rawls identifies the origins of liberalism in the aftermath of the wars of religion and maintains that one of the significant achievements of liberalism is advancing religious tolerance by privatizing religion and clearing the public domain of religious interference. Sachedina concludes that a project to advance human rights norms based on cultural or value translations would be futile.
