Human Rights and Revolutions

Abstract

"For liberals committed to the priority of the individual and theinviolability of individual rights, religion and revolution are both suspect,"observes Timothy McDaniel in this volume's final essay, "The StrangeCareer of Radical Islam." Although the sentiment is intended to usefullycomplicate the canvas of contemporary human rights discourse, it iscurious that the nexus of religion with human rights and revolutionsreceives no analytical attention at all in the volume's twelve precedingcontributions - not even in Lynn Hunt's otherwise trenchant openingsurvey of "The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights." Ostensibly, whatthis book casts as the paradox of revolutions, as both fueling and underminingthe pursuit of human rights, is played out by revolutionary Islamicmovements that profess liberation (according to their own lights), onlyto deliver repression. But the result is that "radical Islam," which isundefined, becomes the sole context in which the reader is invited to reflecton the religion-human rights nexus, much less the particular interfaceof Islam and Muslims with the welter of rights-movements, ideas andpractices.Which is all the more regrettable in view of Hunt's insightful groundingat the outset, (Chapter One), of the interplay of democracy and humanrights in attitudes toward the autonomy of the individual, coupled withcommunal recognition of key elements of the human condition. Drawingon French revolutionary history, she illustrates how newly robust claims onbehalf of the person - as in the opposition to what had been the casualinfliction of "legal" torture to elicit confessions and information, or tolettres de cachets that allowed parents to jail disobedient offspring -emerged alongside a print culture of novels and newspapers that exposedthe psyche of social strangers. The upshot, for Hunt, is an "imaginedempathy" (after Benedict Anderson's "imagined community") - a keypsychological field of identification with other autonomous individuals,often female, as being like oneself. Surely there is abundant scope forapplying this notion to the unfolding of human rights discourses, whether"traditionalist" or "modem," in the Muslim world (or for that matter to ...