Human Rights and Revolutions By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt and Marilyn B. Young, eds. (Pennsylvania: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 253 pages.)

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 ...