Lost in Translation: Human Rights Between Western Secularism and Islamic Scripturalism

The article starts questioning whether it is reasonable to demand that the “Universal” human rights—developed as the outgrowth of the Western natural law tradition, tied up with Europe’s 18th-century political history—be accepted as universal even by cultures that have developed along paths completely different from the Western one, as is the case with the Islamic culture, or if would it not be wiser, considering the relativity of cultures, to expect that Western theory cannot just be translated and transplanted in contexts where it has not flourished on its own. After an examination of the Islamic most traditional views on human rights, and after a brief overview of the main sources of Islamic law, the paper concentrates on a particular concept in Islamic theology—the idea of fitra—which could provide an original, Islamic basis for the universalization of these rights. The importance of this concept (which could be considered as an analogue, in Islamic culture, of Western natural law) coupled with the possibility, theorized by many important Islamic thinkers, of returning to apply to the shari’a the tool of interpretation (ijtihad), brings towards the conclusion that there need not be any necessary contradiction between Islam and the universality of human rights.