An Na in literature and culture

Human rights: An-Na'im

An-Na'im wants to pursue a cross-cultural approach to human rights. Do you think this approach is capable of avoiding the twin dangers of universalism and relativism? Why or why not?

When international legal scholars, activists, and organizations attempt to advance the universalizing concept that all human beings are entitled to the same human rights, regardless of where they may live, they are often faced with an administrative and cross-cultural barriers of translating concepts that are seen as 'Western' into understandable terms for peoples of other cultures. Such organizations are often accused of having a covert agenda to impose Western values upon other nations. Even when such international groups and organizations, such as the Untied Nation or Amnesty International, succeed in seeing appropriate protective legislation advanced within developing nations, these conditions may not have common support amongst the populace or proper administrative support to be enforced by the government.

The problem with 'universal' human rights is that such rights must be enforced in a multinational and multicultural world. Such a world embraces different concepts of the individual, political rights in general, and different rights within different nations are often differently accorded to genders, peoples of different faiths and ethnicities, and peoples of alternate sexual orientations. How can a Western woman, a legal scholar from America, for example, advocate to a Muslim nation that women should have equal political rights?

But the international legal scholar Abdullah an-Na'im suggests that fundamentally, all cultures have similar values, and that the divides are not between, for example, Islam and Western society. Rather, the divides that seem to exist between the Islamic and Western worlds are in fact between individual people who do not value their fellow human beings. Individual intransigence and intolerance are to blame for human rights abuses, not the existence of different values.

In other words, there is no problem or real difference between Islam and secular societies, the 'problem' is between, for example, terrorists and people who value the rule of law -- and terrorists have existed in the West, just as the rule of law is present in many Islamic societies. an-Na'im states that the world, through international organizations, must promote connections between people who want to contribute to human values and people who share that commitment can collaborate across apparent insurmountable cultural divides.

An-Na'im is hardly naive, however, for he recognizes constitutions and laws may grant, for example, women equality on paper, but in practice customs on a non-universal level can be adverse to improving women's conditions. A woman might be given universal human rights in theory, but in practice, traditional custom may prevail in actual fact. On a community level the national state may have less legal influence, and a woman may still find her life options limited by her gender. But this is all the more reason, an-Na'im suggests, that cross-cultural collaboration is necessary. A universal organization can demand that a state give equal rights to women, to minority ethnic and religious groups, or that a state attempt to stamp out human rights abuses. But merely because such policies are codified in law means nothing -- unless individuals within the nation are willing to enforce such laws and unless institutions are created to support the administration of such human rights laws on a regular basis. Human rights must be enforced from the grass roots up, according to an-Na'im -- the rights are universal, but the administration is nationalistic and culturally specific.

Thus, dialogue must exist cross-culturally, and also within the different cultures of a nation, so that human rights can be enforced in feasible, comprehensible, and workable terms fort he local population. One must understand the culture of a nation before one deigns how human rights and political rights in general must be enforced. For women in many traditional countries, such as the Sudan, economic and social rights are linked to political and civil rights. The ability of women to act politically will most likely determine their success economically in the long run. In other nations, such as Saudi Arabia, some women may be economically powerful because of the wealth of their husbands or fathers, but this has yet to translate into political influence.

In other words, an-Na'im denies the relativistic notion that women simply have different ways of exercising their rights in traditional cultures, in the absence of being accorded social and political rights. But different countries still have different immediate legal and political needs of administration, and hence the need for cross-cultural dialogue and specificity between international human rights groups and nations, to decide the best way to realize the needs of a specific nation. Thus, an-Na'im is both more specific than the universal advancers of human rights dogma, as an-Na'im insists that addressing the particular needs of nations and communities is essential. Still, despite such differences, a respect for human dignity is both Islamic as well as Western, even though in both Muslim and Western nations women and other minority groups have been denied their human rights by individuals in different ways throughout the ages.