The gulf in perception between Islamic and secular perspectives over the meaning of human rights is growing. Media reports and western governments repeatedly charge Muslim governments from Sudan to Iran of human rights violations. When human rights concerns are raised, officials from Muslim countries accuse the West of using a double standard in its application of human rights, of mounting the human right claim as an instrument of political power against nations who do not further its political and economic agendas. Some Muslims argue that Islam has a human rights dispensation that surpasses secular human rights declaration. Others claim that the differences between Islamic and secular constructs of human rights are but minor philosophical quibbles without significant consequences in content and practice. This essay thus examines the differences between secular human rights and Islamic rights and argues that they are indeed conceptually different things. However, contemporary Muslim thought may be able to produce a rights system, I would argue, that may be based on different ethical and moral premises but not dissimilar to secular human rights declarations in their outcomes. The success of a modem Islamic human rights theory depends on the extent to which modem Islamic thought would be open to a revisionist or reconstructionist approach in philosophy and ethical orientation.
