Islamic and Iranian Perspectives on Human Rights

Abstract

The Islamic human rights discourse has a completely different history of origin and different determinants than the secular human rights discourse. The two questions of “origin” and “universality” are interlinked, because the demand and desire to make the acceptance of human rights concrete and effective depends not only on state enforceability but crucially also on people’s identification with the presuppositions that ground human rights as a moral claim. There are different ideas of what human rights mean and, above all, how they are justified. In this case study, the very contrasting positions on human rights are presented, on the one hand, by the so-called traditional Islam, and on the other, by the so-called reformist Islam.