Islam and human rights, clashing normative orders

Islam and human rights are often paired as starkly opposed normative orders. This dissertation, however, demonstrates that there is neither necessarily a clash nor a need for reconciliation between them---their interrelationship is far more ambiguous and, ultimately, complementary. Human rights does not attack Islam, nor does Islam place a box around the political-legal possibilities which exist in Muslim societies. Each have to be seen in the context of historical norms and contemporary politics if analyses are to move beyond barren invocations of clashing or reconciling orders.; Islam and human rights do sometimes conflict in discrete areas. Sometimes they can be reconciled through fresh readings of Islamic law or sensitive readings of human rights norms which emphasize their common ground. Most often, however, they function on fundamentally distinct religious-cultural and political-legal planes. This makes talk of clash or reconciliation an irrelevant diversion from the true issues of importance to particular conflicts. Islam and human rights interact within a broad range of political, social, and cultural circumstance and may be deployed within them in a greater or lesser oppositional manner. This should be the point from which any theoretical model begins.; The dissertation's three case studies---India's Muslim minority confronting majoritarian nationalism, the international implications of Khomeini's fatwa on Rushdie, and constitution drafting in the Palestinian Authority---demonstrate the complexity of issues implicated under the Islam and human rights rubric, particularly group and minority rights. The on-the-ground realities of the case studies show that it is these issues and how they play out in local, regional and global contexts which are far more determinative of such situations than are macro factors such as a supposed global confrontation between Islam and human rights.; There are multiple repositories of ideological power within all societies. Human rights have become globally relevant as a buffer from the power of the modern nation-state, albeit a legally delimited and politically constrained buffer. Islam is one element among others of import to contemporary politics, albeit a poly-local, poly-vocal element. An exaggerated focus on their interrelationship, however, distorts both human rights and Islam and strengthens ideologies of opposition between them.