A Muslim and Christian orientation to human rights: human dignity and solidarity

On the far side of the terrifying abyss of World War II—the culmination of humanity’s most horrific and deadly half century—nations came together and hammered out the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As any legal (or quasi-legal) document of its kind, it truly was the product of an arduous process of negotiation and debate—two years, in fact. Of the forty-eight original signatory nations, none voted against it and only eight abstained, mostly communist bloc countries and one Muslim-majority State, Saudi Arabia. As the Muslim world witnessed a resurgence of conservative religiosity starting in the 1970s, more criticism of the human rights concept and its international law documents arose in that context. As a result, European Muslims drafted the “Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights” in 1981 and nine years later the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) published the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. My purpose in this paper is not to discuss the intra-Muslim debates