Human Rights and Revolutions

Abstract

"For liberals committed to the priority of the individual and the inviolability of individual rights, religion and revolution are both suspect," observes Timothy McDaniel in this volume's final essay, "The Strange Career of Radical Islam." Although the sentiment is intended to usefully complicate the canvas of contemporary human rights discourse, it is curious that the nexus of religion with human rights and revolutions receives no analytical attention at all in the volume's twelve preceding contributions - not even in Lynn Hunt's otherwise trenchant opening survey of "The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights." Ostensibly, what this book casts as the paradox of revolutions, as both fueling and undermining the pursuit of human rights, is played out by revolutionary Islamic movements that profess liberation (according to their own lights), only to deliver repression. But the result is that "radical Islam," which is undefined, becomes the sole context in which the reader is invited to reflect on the religion-human rights nexus, much less the particular interface of Islam and Muslims with the welter of rights-movements, ideas and practices. Which is all the more regrettable in view of Hunt's insightful grounding at the outset, (Chapter One), of the interplay of democracy and human rights in attitudes toward the autonomy of the individual, coupled with communal recognition of key elements of the human condition. Drawing on French revolutionary history, she illustrates how newly robust claims on behalf of the person - as in the opposition to what had been the casual infliction of "legal" torture to elicit confessions and information, or to lettres de cachets that allowed parents to jail disobedient offspring - emerged alongside a print culture of novels and newspapers that exposed the psyche of social strangers. The upshot, for Hunt, is an "imagined empathy" (after Benedict Anderson's "imagined community") - a key psychological field of identification with other autonomous individuals, often female, as being like oneself. Surely there is abundant scope for applying this notion to the unfolding of human rights discourses, whether "traditionalist" or "modem," in the Muslim world (or for that matter to ...