The Role of Muslims in the Formulation of the UDHR
Authors like Mayer and Donnely have emphasized and reminded their readers that Muslim states were signatories to the UDHR and took an active role in its final drafting. Mayer argues, “All in all, it is inaccurate to claim that when the foundations of the modern UN human rights system were being laid, Muslim countries were foes of human rights universality.” Mayer, in particular, seems to be very happy and pleased to find Susan Waltz’ article “Universal Human Rights: The Contribution of Muslim States.” The manner in which Mayer and Donnelly refer to these facts gives one the feeling that they are trying to say that Muslims have no room to argue or complain today because, in reality, they were part of the process and agreed to the concept of international human rights law.

However, especially coming from authors like Mayer and Donnelly, the points that they are trying to make are weak if not downright deceiving. Mayer discusses this issue for several pages but in the end there are no points that she was trying to make that have any validity to them.


This is so for the following reasons:
(1)    People like Donnelly and Mayer argue that Islam is not a monolith. Hence, just because they found a sector of Muslims—most likely, the elite, many times Western educated—who bought into this movement and signed onto it, then, according to their own thesis, one cannot assume that all the other Muslims (perhaps the majority) agree with it or are in line with it.   


This important point did not escape Oh 21-22 who wrote,
Although the international scale of the human rights project demonstrates that the instigators of the UDHR earnestly attempted to include non-Western voices, they were nonetheless products of their time. The majority of the leaders of the human rights effort in the late 1940s were Western-educated white men of privilege from Europe and the United States. They guided an effort that remained in its overall structure a product of their beliefs and imagination, even if along the way they sought input from delegates of non-Western nations.

Her view was echoed by Renteln who noted “that all the eighteen drafts considered for the UDHR ‘came from the democratic West and that all but two were in English’.” She concluded thus that “(t)he fact that there were no dissenting votes should not be taken to mean that complete value consensus had been achieved.”

(2)    Mayer  argues that the Muslims involved in the original human rights documents did not object to the document based on Islamic grounds. It seems that they did not see any problem with these documents from an Islamic perspective. At the same time, though, Mayer admits elsewhere that Islamic scholars did not take up the issue of human rights until the Islamic revival in the 70s, after the Arab-Israeli wars.  In fact, the most-conservative Saudi Arabia’s representative to the original was a Lebanese Christian.  How then can she argue that Muslims were truly involved when she realizes the fact that from an Islamic perspective this issue was never taken up until much later? Indeed, she goes beyond that and admits that for the most part, Islam was simply ignored or not taken seriously by the developers of human rights law.


Here is what she herself wrote,
The learned literature on international human rights produced by academic specialists has traditionally shown an indifference to the Islamic tradition. Until recently, Islamic law was only occasionally mentioned in scholarly writing on international human rights, and then it was treated as a marginal, exotic phenomenon. Behind this lay an assumption about the authority of international law and its associated institutions and a belief in the relative backwardness of any Islamic models with which international law might conflict. The critiques offered by Muslims who object to international human rights law on religious grounds did not provoke much consternation or interest on the part of Western scholars of international law, for the latter did not feel that the legitimacy of international law was in any way jeopardized by assertions that it clashed with Islamic rules.

(3)    There is no mandate/vote involved. Some today argue that Muslims throughout the world do not have a chance to vote on implementing Islam and that if they were allowed to cast such a vote, they would reject Islam. Interestingly enough, there has never been any type of vote by the masses on human rights declarations. In particular, when the first documents were passed, the Muslim states were post-colonial states, many times run by ex-colonial officers or dictatorships. Hence, one cannot claim that they represent any kind of will of the people or Islam itself. In fact, many were socialists, capitalists, areligious and so on.

(4)    When one reviews the articles that were objected to during the development of the UDHR, Muslims at that time, according to Mayer,  were objecting to some of the same issues that the Muslim scholars are objecting to today, such as issues related to marriage and family.  In other words, instead of proving her point that Muslims should not complain about the human rights documents since they had a hand in the original documents, she has to admit that Muslims have been objecting to some of the same issues since the inception of the human rights movement.

There is no need to delve into the Muslim role in the history of the early human rights documents any further than what was stated above. What authors like Mayer and Donnelly are trying to substantiate is meaningless and, in reality, simply not there. Their discussion are extremely weak if they are trying to imply in any way that Muslims today should not object to human rights documents because somehow some other Muslims or Muslim governments were involved in the original designing of such documents.


Actually, Mayer herself highlights one of the differences between an Islamic view of human rights and a Western view of human rights, saying,
It is often overlooked that the package of rights in the International Bill includes economic and social rights. Muslim countries generally endorsed the ideas of economic and social rights, which the United States has always opposed as being antithetical to its capitalist ethos. When demands were made that, instead of preparing a single covenant elaborating on the rights set forth in the UDHR, economic and social rights should be set forth in a separate covenant. Muslim countries opposed the splitting of the domain of human rights. Their position ultimately proved to be a losing one, but in recent years, supporters of human rights have tended to see human rights as being mutually reinforcing, concluding that splitting the UDHR into two separate covenants was misguided and harmful for rights. Thus, the position of Muslim delegates, the more progressive position, has belatedly won some vindication.


In fact, she goes even further and demonstrates another great divide between the “Western” approach and the approach held by Muslims:
Muslim countries’ positions on self-determination and the wrongs of colonialism were emphatically endorsed by a majority of UN members and became enshrined in many international human rights documents. At the same time, Western countries did not always take the stances that are associated with a pro-human rights philosophy and sometimes joined those opposing minority rights, measures to ensure effective implementation of human rights, and bans on discrimination.

Finally, regardless of what role Muslim states may have had in the development of some of the first human rights documents, there is no question that the trend in human rights thinking and documents since that time has been dominated by Western representatives and a “Western” perspective, a point that Mayer never made in her work.


Baderin notes,
Joseph, Schultz, and Castan have however observed that ‘a Western representative bias can be detected in recent years, with over half of the [Human Rights Commission] members serving from 1998 to 2000 coming from the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Israel, Finland, Germany and Poland’.Thus the need for the reflection of a more ‘equitable distribution of membership’ not only of the HRC but of all the UN human rights treaty bodies cannot be overemphasized.


More Recent Developments: Cairo, Beijing and Related Matters
In more recent years, the demand for respect of human rights has continued. At the same time, the scope and gamut of human rights has also expanded and become much more specific. General statements of earlier documents are made more precise and particular groups (such as women and children) have been targeted.


Later documents stemming from the UN, which were not as widely ratified as some of the earlier documents, include:
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (December 1979)

Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (December 1984)


Convention on the Rights of the Child (December 1992)
In particular, mostly due to Western liberal influences, the demands for sexual freedoms and alternative lifestyle rights have dominated much of the discussion. In 1994, Cairo hosted the World Population Conference. Among the issues emphasized at that conference were “the advancement and empowerment of women, the elimination of all kinds of violence against women and women’s right to control their own fertility.”  In 1995, the Beijing Conference on Women was held.


It made new demands for the sake of women. In the words of Desai,
The most significant new addition to thedocument is the acknowledgment of a kindof right to sexuality: “The human rights ofwomen include their rights to have controlover and decide freely and responsibly onmatters related to their sexuality includingsexual and reproductive health, free of coercion,discrimination, and violence.”

The Document fell short of explicitly declaring lesbianism, for example, as a human right. That was a contentious part of the debate surrounding the Platform. Needless to say, numerous religious groups oppose that type of “right.” Hence, Beijing concluded with the above vague statement that actually could be interpreted to imply that such must be accepted as a human right.
In addition, the tone and conclusion was much bolder.


Again, Desai writes,
As one workshop organizerobserved: “In Nairobi we were tentative, theemphasis was on that governments shouldsupport the international human rightstreaties; in Beijing the demand is: governmentsmust comply.”

These types of “rights” are now being demanded while other explicitly agreed upon rights continued to be, more or less, ignored. Nowadays, human rights are classified into various categories by subject, object or “generation.” The major emphasis is still on civil and political rights. As Baderin notes, these rights are the “favourites of Western States, some of whom considered them as the only true human rights.”  Economic, social and cultural rights are referred to as “second generation” rights. They may be favored by a number of developing nations but, as of yet, there is not a strong support for them in the overall human rights movement. This is interesting because the rights that are perhaps most needed for the protection of “human dignity” is given less attention by human rights programs. Again, Baderin notes, “Despite their inevitability for the sustenance of human dignity, the economic, social, and cultural rights are often considered as ‘utopian aspirations’, non-legal and non-justiciable.” Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s US ambassador to the United Nations, described these rights as, “a letter to Santa Claus.”  Bricmont noted that her statement did not get much response from the press and intellectuals. He wondered what would have been the response if someone were to have called the civil and political rights “a letter to Santa Claus.”

The third generation of rights refers to collective rights and not individual rights. This third generation of rights includes the “right to peace”  and the “right to development.” These are the most recent concepts and have received the least amount of overall attention.

Although the UN General Assembly has asserted that all human rights are indivisible and interdependent, the practice of human rights has been very different. Thus, when international organizations present their lists of major human rights violators, the violations are mostly concerned with the “first generation” rights and very little attention is given to all of the other varied rights. This bias concerning the emphasis of the human rights movement is one of the reasons that Islam and other religions are targeted as being at variance with hguman rights while entire social systems that pay little attention to the needs of the poor, for example, are not highlighted and blasted in the media.

In sum, regardless of the history and original foundations of human rights and regardless of whether each society has had its own vision of human rights, there is definitely a Western bias in the contemporary human rights movement. The rest of the world is viewed in the light of a Western yardstick. This has led to a very paradoxical situation in which in the name of human rights and freedom other societies and cultures are expected to mimic and imitate these norms of the West. Incidentally, this does not bode well for the human rights movement itself, as more and more voices have been raised to challenge its view of the world and individual societies.

Given the overall “consensus” that many authors point to concerning the acceptance and authority of human rights, there is still a great deal of difference concerning which rights are indeed human rights and, concerning human rights that are agreed upon, how such human rights are to be implemented. Even in the nations of the West, the self-proclaimed leaders of the human rights crusade, there are still great variances in how these human rights are put into law and practice.