ABSTRACT
Introduction To those who argue that attaining full human rights is a universal human aspiration, others may respond that the notion of human rights is simply a product of one particular civilisation’s history ... many Middle Easterners have ideas about human rights that ... must be understood in the context of the sustained engagement between the Middle East and the West going back to the time of Muslim penetration into Spain and Europe in the eighth century, through the Crusades of the eleventh century and beyond, and into the more recent colonial and post-colonial periods. This context has forged complex, many tiered, starkly ambivalent, and often actively hostile attitudes in many Middle Easterners towards Western traditions, Western forces, and Westerners themselves. The idea of ‘human rights’, closely associated with the West over the last few decades, is prey to the same complexity.
