Notion Of Human Rights Research Articles

Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti

Reviewed by: Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti Andrew J. Cuff Riccardo Saccenti, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2016) xiii + 155 pp. Few areas of inquiry require a road map to the secondary scholarship as desperately as the history of human rights and natural law jurisprudence. Thankfully, Riccardo Saccenti's new literature review of numerous legal historians restrains itself to a highly readable eighty pages, and maintains a careful balance among numerous historiographies. In addition, copious notes and lengthy citations from primary and secondary sources make this text extremely useful for the researcher who wishes to focus on a specific angle of medieval natural law. Saccenti is as conversant with the historical sources and their philosophical contexts as he is with the long history of their interpretation in the modern period. His excellent monograph can handily bring any scholar up to speed on all three as well. The basic question at issue in Saccenti's investigation is the following: how have scholars of jurisprudence typically connected the idea of ius in the Middle Ages to its instantiations in the enlightenment era of liberal democracy? In other words, did thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes originate the jurisprudence of human rights (like life, liberty, and property), or were they simply building on some kind of ancient and medieval tradition? Scholars conversant with this line of inquiry may note that Nicholas Wolterstorff's 2008 book Justice: Rights and Wrongs focused a great deal on this question as well, extending the history of natural law even further back, to the Byzantines, ancient Greeks, and Hebrew scriptures. Unfortunately, Saccenti's book does not interact with or even acknowledge the existence of Wolterstorff's. This is likely a result of the lack of communication between the fields of philosophy and medieval law. Wolterstorff's Justice is mainly aimed at creating a systematic apologetic for his understanding of natural law, with history serving as a backdrop. Saccenti, on the other hand, is providing a full review of secondary literature for historians. Debating Medieval Natural Law presents three major interpretations of the history of subjective rights as a conversation about ius and its various meanings. The first is that medieval canonists such as Gratian, Huguccio, Bernard of Pavia, and Raymond of Penyafort (to name some of the most famous) originated a jurisprudence that set the stage for a radical shift in the [End Page 261] modern period toward individual rights. The second, a view popular with Thomists, argues that it was William of Ockham (d. 1347) whose nominalism and divine voluntarism led to legal positivism and the modern notion of human rights as individual powers (such as habeas corpus, power of attorney, or other "constitutional protections"). The third view is almost whiggish in its outlook, namely that the entire history of ius is a slow evolution from the ancient Roman sense of dominium to the birth of inherent subjective rights in the twelfth century, to the flowering of those rights in the modern period. Saccenti gives each perspective its due and exhaustively covers the history of scholarship in support of each. The view that turns William of Ockham into the radical legal iconoclast Saccenti assigns to Michel Villey, a French legal historian of the post-war period. Villey's model, offered in his Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit (1957) and several other books and articles, argued that the medieval Thomistic conception of ius sharply contrasts with that of Locke and other modernists, in the sense that medieval philosophy centered ius around the dignity of human nature and what is owed to it, rather than the faculty of individual humans to justly claim the power to act in certain ways. He identified Ockham's metaphysics as the central underpinning of this development, given that the nominalist Ockhamist school did not hold to any metaphysics of human nature, making all faculties and powers individual, and based on the subjective properties of the individual. Other historians followed Villey, such as Francis Oakley and Richard Tuck, to add that Ockham's extreme voluntarism rendered the human and divine will free from the dictates of natural...

Social Responsibility and the State's Duty to provide Healthcare: An Islamic Ethico-Legal Perspective.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights asserts that governments are morally obliged to promote health and to provide access to quality healthcare, essential medicines and adequate nutrition and water to all members of society. According to UNESCO, this obligation is grounded in a moral commitment to promoting fundamental human rights and emerges from the principle of social responsibility. Yet in an era of ethical pluralism and contentions over the universality of human rights conventions, the extent to which the UNESCO Declaration can motivate behaviors and policies rests, at least in part, upon accepting the moral arguments it makes. In this essay I reflect on a state's moral obligation to provide healthcare from the perspective of Islamic moral theology and law. I examine how Islamic ethico-legal conceptual analogues for human rights and communal responsibility, ḥuqūq al-'ibād and farḍ al-kifāyah and other related constructs might be used to advance a moral argument for healthcare provision by the state. Moving from theory to application, I next illustrate how notions of human rights and social responsibility were used by Muslim stakeholders to buttress moral arguments to support American healthcare reform. In this way, the paper advance discourses on a universal bioethics and common morality by bringing into view the concordances and discordances between Islamic ethico-legal constructs and moral arguments advanced by transnational health policy advocates. It also provides insight into applied Islamic bioethics by demonstrating how Islamic ethico-legal values might inform the discursive outputs of Muslim organizations.

Collaborative Barriers and Cultural Brokers: Competing Conceptions of Gender Equality in Potosí, Bolivia

This article examines barriers to collaborations that arise between Andean farmers and a Bolivian rural development NGO in efforts toward agroecology. Despite their shared concerns, tensions are evident in the power imbalances embedded in these relationships, as well as in the divergent values and meanings assigned to participation and equality, most evident when viewed through the lens of gender. The implications of these tensions extend to how gendered human rights are understood more broadly. Western liberal notions of human rights may conflict with local cultures’ notions of these rights, informed by the organizing principle of gender complementarity. To explore this, ethnographic data on farm women’s participation, issues of decision-making power, and their public voices and silence are brought forth, demonstrating how the NGO is positioned as cultural broker between two different conceptions of equality – that of the farm families and the funding agencies and partners from the Global North.

Against Individualism and Comparing the Philosophies of Rosemont and Sandel

ABSTRACTAgainst Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion presents Henry Rosemont’s reflection on possible Confucian-based avenues for considering solutions to contemporary moral, political, and spiritual problems. Rosemont contends that the ideologies of capitalist economies, which are based largely on competition, and belief in autonomous individuality, including abstract notions of human rights, are fundamentally unable to deal effectively with many of today’s most pressing issues. For example, he argues against appealing to universalist principles in an attempt to dissolve ethical and political tensions between cultures and states. In accordance with this orientation, his work is then best judged on the contributions it makes to constructing new perspectives on the problems addressed rather than how accurately he represents any tradition. In fact, Rosemont readily admits that he may be “unfair” to individualism or “creative[ly] misreading” early Confucianism.In this review article, I will argue that some of the differences Rosemont finds between his Confucian critique of individualism and the communitarian critique of individualism are, in fact, not all that dissimilar. For example, while Rosemont sees Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel as “individualists,” the general orientation of their communitarian response to libertarianism shares much in common with the Confucian “role ethics” perspective on the person and morality or ethics. In this way, I will argue that while Confucian role ethics and communitarian perspectives certainly have their respective emphases, they also have a lot to offer one another.

The rhetoric of “responsible fishing”: Notions of human rights and sustainability in the European Union's bilateral fishing agreements with developing states

Over the past two decades, European Union rhetoric has communicated a desire to take on a normative power role in advancing human rights and sustainable development approaches in the context of global fisheries policy. Officials have propagated an image of a “new Europe,” committed to promoting good maritime governance and ensuring responsible fishing worldwide as part of its global responsibility to human rights and sustainable development. These normative principles have at times been framed as an integral part of the European Union's legal and political identity. In practice, however, the European Union's bilateral fishing agreements with developing states have come short of European Union aspirations, facing criticism for hindering rather than aiding local development. This paper explores the bilateral agreements from an international law perspective, engaging in grounded theory, discourse analysis, and a detailed case study on European Union-Senegal fishing relations. For the European Union, the article raises questions about conflicts between national and supranational fishing goals and about the challenges these conflicts present to its goal of normative leadership. More generally, the study suggests implications for enacting international law principles on the ground, as well as for the inherent power dynamics of post-colonial relations.

Rethinking Radical Inclusiveness: A Theoretical Provocation

The notions of human rights and identity politics have been widely drawn on in the contemporary understandings and practices of developing more inclusive cities. Examining the UN Habitat III Issue Paper on Inclusive Cities (2015), in this article I attempt to identify and problematize some assumptions that might have underpinned our efforts to improve the inclusiveness of our cities. I argue that a liberal view of human being has constrained the understandings about who “everyone” is, the nature of their sense of self, and what they want; which subsequently might exclude and marginalise those who do not fit our conceptions. Alternatively, I will draw on poststructuralist theorisation of discourse and subjectivity to offer a new way of thinking about human rights and identity politics, and discuss how it might contribute to our understanding and practices of inclusiveness.

Human Rights as Placeholders

Two prevailing “traditional” notions of human rights also cause the current skeptical mood concerning human rights. Either human rights are seen in a morally exaggerated way as “trump cards” in political negotiations, or they are pruned back to a purely juridical level, absorbed into legal instances that accord them at most the rank of constitutional rights. In contrast to this, the author defends a political conception of human rights that overcomes the problems besetting both conceptions, but without having to sacrifice their critical, normative content or a realistic role for human rights in international politics. A political conception of human rights assumes, the author argues firstly, that human rights grow out of concrete experiences of injustice and are the product of political struggles. Human rights are, secondly, placeholders for the public thematization of oppression, humiliation, marginalization, and despotism. A third characteristic feature of a political conception of human rights is that human rights raise claims to a rule system that permits access to the freedoms and resources formulated by human rights. And finally, the obligations imposed by human rights are not duties of assistance but institutional duties to realize the conditions for exercising human rights. Human rights, the author concludes, can be “used” by any person to criticize existing ordering structures and can be activated for political purposes directed to the common good.

From Colored Cosmopolitanism to Human Rights: A Historical Overview of the Transnational Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract The last twenty years have witnessed an outpouring of scholarship on the transnational dimensions of the African American freedom struggle. Drawing on that scholarship, this essay offers a synthetic overview of the global civil rights movement from two specific and distinct lenses: human rights and colored solidarity. Beginning in the 1920s, notions of a dark or colored world connected African Americans to anti-imperial and antiracist movements abroad. In the 1950s and 1960s, solidarities based on notions of color were gradually replaced by a human rights framework and a new focus on the third world. The colored world lost its centrality as the leaders of postcolonial nations turned away from global antiracism toward state-centered visions of international relations. After 1968, however, colored cosmopolitanism experienced a resurgence within the United States as a result of shifting patterns of migration. On the global scale, by contrast, notions of human rights emerged triumphant in the discourse of international organizations and in the popular imagination of many countries. The achievement of those rights remains, however, woefully incomplete. While the promise of the colored world failed to survive decolonization, the promise of human rights endures more as a goal than a reality.

Counter narratives, the psychology of liberation, and the evolution of a women’s social movement in Nicaragua.

In response to a rise of dictatorships, the exacerbation of inequality, and violations of human rights in many Latin American countries, individuals have joined together through the formation of social movements to enact powerful, revolutionary changes in the area of human rights. TheMovimiento Autonomo de Mujeres(Autonomous Women’s Movement) in Nicaragua, specifically, was birthed out of the Sandinista Revolution when many women joined a massive national uprising during the 1970s in an effort to overthrow a dictatorship. The current study uses thematic narrative analysis to examine the oral histories of 13 key leaders within theMovimientoto understand how women’s interactions with counter narratives have played a significant role in creating a more expansive and inclusive notion of human rights, and have fueled a pointed commitment to the use of human rights discourse in a strategic political agenda aimed at improving women’s lived experience. The findings suggest that the leaders of the Movimientodeepened their understanding of human rights beyond traditional discourse through varied understandings of the consequences of inequality and, through an evolving process of awareness and action, developed a duty to challenge the dominant narratives that limited whose rights were realized. Moreover, our analysis connects the use of counter narratives that employ human rights discourse to current legislation and policy in Nicaragua that enhances the realization of women’s human rights.

Islam and Human Rights: A Growing Rapprochement?

AbstractCan Islamic thought provide a basis for a fully developed theory of human rights? This article begins with an examination of the tensions between religion in general and the secular framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). From a historical perspective, it then delves into the history of the relationship between Muslim political and religious leaders and the UDHR. With that background in mind, the author analyzes the positions of three influential Muslim scholars on human rights: Khaled Abou El Fadl's emphasis on ethics and law; Abdulaziz Sachedina's recent book Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2009), in which he urges the traditionalists to develop a “public theology”; and finally, Abdullahi An‐Na'im's focus on shari'a and the secular state. He concludes that the majority of Muslims worldwide remain more conservative than these authors, and yet they overwhelmingly support the notion of human rights. This bodes well for the growing influence of such reformist thinking and, as a result, for the retooling of traditional Islamic jurisprudence in addressing human rights.

Remembering a sociology of Human Rights

A sociology of human rights sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. Sociology is about social groups, about particular experiences, about how people, embedded in space and time, make sense of their lives and give meaning to their world. It deals with power and interest and the social bases of our experiences. On the other hand, human rights are about human beings in general, without temporal or spatial references, not about groups and their boundaries. Human rights are about humanity, located in the world and connected to an inviolable nature. Global media representations, among others, create new cosmopolitan memories , providing new epistemological vantage points and emerging moral-political interdependencies. As such, memories of the Holocaust contribute to the creation of a common European cultural memory based on the abstract notion of human rights. Sociologically, a theory of human rights has to show how universal and particular memories co-exist, are reconciled etc. and what it means for the recognition of the “other”, and the broadening of circles of solidarity.

Status and Limit of Human Rights: Right to Life under Nigerian Constitution, 1999 with Focus on Rural Women in Akwa Ibom State

The notion of human rights is now entrenched in most constitutions around the world. Many writers agree that the notion involves a set of inalienable rights endowed by the Creator in to the nature of man to make meaning of humanity of man; to the extent that its alienation is to be permitted by law. This paper, analytically explained the status and limits of the rights which are still subject of heated debate today. In explaining the thematic concepts of these series, the paper recognized right to life as the pivot of all rights and picked it out from the beautiful array of human rights guaranteed under the constitution of Nigeria, 1999 and analyzed it; keeping focus on women issues connected thereto. Provisions of statutes, materials from judicial precedents, law Texts, Journals and Newspapers; including cyber world were used in resolving issues under this paper. Findings made revolve around the fact that the constitution drawn to protect right to life also allows killing even in defence property; no matter how meaningless it is in value; that cultural barriers also exist against women’s right to life. Hence, the paper made recommendations to improve the state of right as it relates to women in Nigeria and particularly rural women in Akwa Ibom State. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n26p154

Media Analysis of Albino Killings in Tanzania: A Social Work and Human Rights Perspective

Murders of people with albinism are a recently emerging human rights issue in Africa, particularly Tanzania. Thus far, public debates about albino killings in Tanzania and other African countries have been dominated by media reports rather than academic writing. This paper presents the findings of a content analysis of Swahili and English Tanzanian media reports published between 2008 and 2011 on albinism and albino murders in Tanzania, and the diverse activities that have unfolded in response to these attacks. Using a human rights framework, the article explores these responses from a social work perspective. It finds that interventions are often framed with reference to African conceptions of humanness. These conceptions are found to be compatible with notions of human rights as relational, in which the various rights and responsibilities of different members of society are seen as interconnected. In practice however, some interventions have resulted in trade-offs between competing rights, causing further harm to victims and their families. To become sustainable therefore, interventions should aim to support all the human rights necessary for the well-being of Africans with albinism, their families and communities. Further research to this effect is recommended.

Human rights critique in post-colonial Africa: practices among Luo in Western Kenya

This paper is written at a time when post-colonial Kenya has largely embraced the language of rights as both a means and an end to organising twenty-first century states and societies. The idea of rights traverses the human rights discourse as theory and builds on notions of ethnography of the particular. The post-colonial African subjects of human rights develop these notions of human rights by living a life of betwixt: by mingling the “modern” and “traditional” into a genre of rights they produce an approach that is not necessarily reflected in the United Nations-centred international human rights instruments. The paper calls for a re-reading of human rights in post-colonial Africa, not based on its philosophical origins or traces of “African imprints,” but rather by observing how ordinary people import, recast and produce ideas of human rights in their life worlds and everyday Kenya. This is what I call post-colonial critique.

Kas yra biopolitikos subjektas? Filosofija, humanizmas ir gyvūniškumas

Straipsnyje analizuojamas žmogaus teisių paradoksas, atskleistas Hannah’os Arendt, Jacques’o Rancière’o ir Giorgio Agambeno darbuose. Žmogaus teisių konceptas veikia kaip biopolitinis aparatas, įdiegiantis žmogaus kaip gyvos būtybės ir žmogaus kaip politinio subjekto perskyrą. Ši gyvūniškumo ir žmogiškumo perskyra, atrandama pačiame žmoguje, rezonuoja su žmogiškumo ir gyvūniškumo klausimu filosofijoje. Klasikinė filosofija – nuo Aristotelio iki Heideggerio imtinai – postuluoja žmogaus ir gyvūno skirtingumą, o Agambenas ir Derrida teigia, kad žmogaus gyvūniškumas ir gyvūno humanizavimas yra tik dvi tos pačios problemos pusės. Toks klausimo performulavimas leidžia pereiti prie Roberto Esposito filosofijos, kurioje teigiamas visų gyvų būtybių lygiavertiškumas bei pačios gyvybės imanentiškumas. Priešingai nei negatyvioji biopolitika, kuri siekė pajungti gyvybę normai ir įstatymui, Esposito nori sukurti teigiančiąją biopolitiką, kurioje norma laikoma imanentiška taisykle, leidžiančia gyvybei siekti maksimalios išraiškos. Nors atrodytų, jog tokia teorija turi mažai ką bendra su politiškumo konceptualizavimu, Esposito teigia, jog būtent ribos tarp zoē ir bios, tarp nuogos gyvybės ir politinės egzistencijos, panaikinimas ne tik nesumažina galimybių veikti politinėje plotmėje, bet, atvirkščiai, yra bet kokio bendro buvimo sąlyga.

"The Power of Words we RARELY Use: Dignity, Rights and Responsibility"

Words matter, but some words are seldom used in management discourse— and that gap has important implications for what is and is not considered relevant for research, teaching, and management practice. In particular, we argue that organizational research should connect more directly with other social sciences to update and enlarge its theoretical repertoire to encompass core elements of humanism, particularly the concepts of human dignity, rights, and responsibilities. Specifically, we propose articulating that connection with the social sciences around three main terms (words): 1) The notion of human dignity which has played a central role in many social sciences, and is credited as a main driver of economic and civilizational progress (Kateb, 2011; McCloskey, 2010; Rosen, 2012). 2) The notion of human rights, which is a mainstay of many social sciences but rarely gets treatment within management other than in business ethics(Levy & Sznaider, 2010; McEldowney & Weick, 2003; Meyer & Parent, 1992; Wettstei...

Derecho natural y derechos humanos: síntesis práctica y complementariedad teórica

La idea moderna de derechos humanos y el concepto clásico de ley natural no son equivalentes. Ciertamente comparten la idea de que no toda ley es convencional. Pero más allá de esto, la noción clásica de ley natural es definida claramente en el marco de las virtudes y, consecuentemente, tiene una orientación más práctica y está atada más de cerca a la historia; la noción de derechos humanos, que han heredado las teorías modernas de los derechos naturales, conduce a la subjetivación del concepto de derecho y tiende a separar al ser humano de su contexto histórico y político, donde los eventos se llevan a cabo. En ese sentido, el concepto clave asociado con los derechos humanos es aquel de “dignidad”. Dado que las dos ideas tienen diferentes puntos de partida y son diferentes en su estatuto epistemológico, no hay, estrictamente hablando, fundamento alguno para imaginar una síntesis de las dos teorías. En el plano teórico sólo podemos hablar de su complementariedad. La síntesis es algo que sólo surgirá en la práctica.

Custom, contestation and co-operation: peace and justice promotion in Somaliland

This article explores alternatives to prevailing state-centric and legalistic approaches to supporting local security and access to justice. It does so through a case study of an initiative developed by an international NGO in partnership with a group of traditional authorities in Somaliland. The initiative aimed at enhancing local security and access to justice, drawing on customary conflict resolution mechanisms and everyday strategies of self-securing. At the same time, the initiative was shaped by international input and liberal notions of human rights and human security. This approach entailed a renegotiation of both local ordering and international discourse. Drawing on our fieldwork, we examine the initiative as it has evolved since 2003, and discuss what it suggests in terms of prospects for international support to ‘non-state’ actors. In particular, the article draws attention to the potential of working with everyday local practices to enable social change rather than focusing narrowly on reforming legal systems (whether state or customary).

PERNIKAHAN BEDA AGAMA DITINJAU DARI PERSPEKTIF ISLAM DAN HAM

Plurality in religion emerges interfaith marriage as debatable motion in Indonesia in general and Islam specifically. Firstly, there are some different interpretations within fuqaha’ or Islamic scholars concerning this matter influenced by some explanations provided in Holy Qur’an. Secondly, as Indonesia is not a secular state, the legality of marriage is regulated throughout the positive law that religious values are applicable. Thirdly, the notion regarding human rights also challenges the problem solving for couple proposing interfaith marriage. Nevertheless, the juridical and philosophical factors underlay the existence of interfaith marriage have vacuum of law. At any rate, this problem is really imminent to solve as marriage implicates child status either. In conclusion, vacuum of law concerning interfaith marriage shall be answered throughout existing law in Indonesia without setting aside the notion of human rights.

Human Rights and the Challenge of Foundations

Human Rights and the Challenge of Foundations Anthony Chase (bio) Abdulaziz Sachedina , Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2009) 248 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 1953 8842 8 Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im , Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a (Harvard University Press 2008), 324 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 6740 2776 3 Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (Mahmoud Sadri & Ahmad Sadri eds. & trans., Oxford University Press 2002), 256 pages, ISBN No. 0195158202 Grace Y. Kao , Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World (Georgetown University Press 2011), 239 pages, ISBN No. 978 1 5890 1733 7 Samuel Moyn , The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010), 337 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 6740 4872 0 Jean H. Quataert , Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press 2009), 355 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 8122 4163 1 Kate Nash , The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK (Cambridge University Press 2009), 224 pages, ISBN No. 0521853524. Are commonly given foundations for human rights convincing (or even needed)? And can the religiously minded accept such foundations if they do not flow out of a religion (presumably their religion)? These questions are a recurring undercurrent in critical thought on human rights that finds vague underpinnings such as "the conscience of mankind" unsatisfying, and finds equally unsatisfying utilitarian notions of human rights as the simple expression of the legal consent of states without need for further elaboration. The demand that human rights require a more explicit foundation may be misleading in a troubling manner. Is the spread of human rights really dependent on a specific foundation, religious or otherwise? It may well be, instead, that such a focus moves attention away from the pluralistic impulses and immediate claims that are actually behind human rights global spread, as a review of literature from a variety of disciplines dealing with human rights can help us understand. An apt starting point in this regard is Abdulaziz Sachedina's Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights, which poses the questions noted above quite directly. As human rights have become more central to political discourse around the globe, work on human rights foundations has been a focus of literature in an expanding range of academic disciplines. It follows that, as disciplines such as religious studies (Sachedina's home), law, history, sociology, and international relations increasingly focus on human rights, each brings their own particular framings to these questions. Human rights and human rights-informed events [End Page 498] are clearly ripe for being explored from multiple disciplinary perspectives. It is less clear, however, if these disciplines are sufficiently exploring each other: we may have explorations of human rights from the perspectives of multiple disciplines, but is there a need for more explicitly interdisciplinary work? Questions of human rights foundations and the role of religion, in particular, would seem to lend themselves to interdisciplinary possibilities. This is, however, the first notable lack in Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights. Its disciplinary focus on religion as a possible foundation for human rights leads to a disconnect from exciting academic work being done on human rights in other fields. This work could give greater dimension to discussions of what allows human rights to make impacts. Sachedina argues that common justifications for human rights are, simply put, not persuasive: human rights need to be placed on a firmer foundation if they are to continue spreading. Sachedina goes further to claim that this is because human rights have moved away from the sort of religious justifications that gave them what he says were their original impulse. Sachedina's solution, therefore, is that there must be a return to these sorts of foundations, particularly if human rights are to gain legitimacy in parts of the world where they are most contested. Most specifically, therefore, his book attempts to articulate how it is that Islam can serve as precisely the sort of religious foundation he maintains human rights needs. In other words, Sachedina's book is seemingly mistitled. Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights has less to do with the...