Decolonizing the “Universal” Human Rights Regime: Questioning American

Exceptionalism and Orientalism

Author(s): Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria
Source: ReOrient , Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn 2018), pp. 59-77Published by: Pluto Journals

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 DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN
RIGHTS REGIME: QUESTIONING AMERICAN
EXCEPTIONALISM AND ORIENTALISM
Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria

Abstract: This article aims to decolonize the discourse of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights through the lens of Critical Muslim Studies, arguing that such systems
of “international norms” are Eurocentric in character and hegemonic in practice. I argue
that the promotion of a Western system of human rights as universal works through the
two pillars of Orientalism and Eurocentrism, focusing particularly on the discourse of
American exceptionalism as a distinct American form of Eurocentrism. Such a critique is
a necessary first step for creating the grounds for alternative human rights orders, such
as the notion of Islamic human rights. To be successful, any alternative Islamic system for
alleviating human oppression and suffering should first dismantle the hegemonic grip of
Orientalism and Eurocentrism on human rights.

Keywords: Human Rights, American exceptionalism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism,

universality, hegemony, critical Muslim studies

Introduction

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (UN General Assembly

1948), which became the bedrock for subsequent international human rights cove-
nants and treaties, was born in 1948 upon the ashes of European and American war
atrocities. While both sides of the struggle had committed war crimes, the declara-
tion was mostly a product of the winners against the losers. It was put together just
3 years after the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which
killed more than 140,000 innocent men, women, and children and brought death
and injury to many more in the years to come. The bombing came only 4 years after
President Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech. Ironically, despite its bleak
human rights record at home and abroad, the United States has ever since claimed
to be the leader of universalizing human rights and more so following the fallback
from the Vietnam War, crafting “human rights into a new language of power
designed to promote American foreign policy” (Peck 2011: 5).

University of Tehran, Iran

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60 REORIENT

While the notion of “human rights” is often promoted as a universal corpus of

values, it has proved highly controversial. These controversies mostly center on
the issues of effectiveness and consistency. The United Nations, the United States,
and other Western powers are often criticized for applying double standards with
regard to human rights enforcement. Western countries in general and the United
States in particular have been criticized for failing to comply with human rights
standards domestically and globally. These centers of power, however, use the
notion of human rights to challenge and pressure adversaries. Critical scholars
argue that the root cause of the problem lies in the Eurocentric nature of the uni-
versal human rights corpus. Critiquing the universal mission of human rights on
the normative scale and highlighting its limitations, they question the very univer-
sality of human rights and its comprehensiveness, thus revealing the narrow
Western-centric nature of the current human rights regime. Scholars taking this
approach level their critique of the current human rights order at the formation
stage in addition to the implementation stage.
Mutua (2002), for example, puts forth “a substantive critique of ‘the Eurocentric
human rights corpus,’” making a case against “the dominant Western human
rights project.” He writes,

What is advocated here is the need for the human rights movement to rethink
and reorient its hierarchized, binary view of the world in which the European
West leads the way and the rest of the globe follows in a structure that resembles
a child–parent relationship. (Mutua 2002: 8–9)

Sayyid’s (2003: 285) definition of Eurocentrism is useful here. Eurocentrism is defined

as “a multidimensional attempt to restore Western cultural practices as universal.”
I argue in this article, which focuses on the American approach to universal
human rights, that American Orientalism and American exceptionalism provide a
firm conceptual basis for such a critique, which is a necessary first step to open the
space for alternative human rights orders, especially that of Islamic human rights.
The discourse of Islamic human rights is based on Islamic philosophical principles
rather than on the Western concepts of humanism, individualism, liberalism, and
secularism. At the most fundamental level, Islamic human rights is based on belief
in the One God and in His exclusive possession of sovereignty (tawhid) from
which the doctrine of the dignity of man as God’s vicegerent on earth is derived.
Consequently, the bedrock of Islamic human rights is “the rejection of all forms of
oppression, both the infliction and the endurance of it, and of dominance, both its
imposition and its acceptance,” to use Article 2c of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s
constitution. Verse 64 of the third chapter of the Quran may well be called the
main declaration of human rights in Islam:

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 61

O People of the Scripture! Come to a common word between us and you: that we
shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and
that none of us shall take others for lords beside God.

Thus, Islamic human rights is part and parcel with the concept of tawhid, which
in turn puts forth the philosophical basis for freedom in Islam and the rejection of
racism, colonialism, and imperialism. “Genuine universality is not possible if the
core content of the human rights corpus is exclusively decided, leaving non-
European cultures with only the possibility of making minor contributions at the
margins and only in its form” (Mutua 2002: 7).
In the first section below, the “universal” human rights discourse is placed
within a wider critique of Orientalism and a discussion of post-Orientalism. It then
gives a brief critical analysis of alternative discourses on human rights. The next
section gives a historicized discussion of American policy toward the issue of
human rights. It shows how, invoking the belief in American exceptionalism, the
United States has historically aimed to insulate its domestic affairs from interna-
tional scrutiny in the realm of human rights while weaponizing human rights in its
relations with adversaries.

From Orientalism to Human Rights: Upholding

Eurocentrism and American Exceptionalism

Any critical assessment of the UDHR and subsequent international human rights
covenants and treaties is incomplete without an appraisal of the context in which
such a regime was born to. The post–World War II world was a world run by
colonial powers: the UDHR was heralded as a universal document while only 58
states had the privilege of being UN members, with 48 signing the declaration,
eight abstaining, and two failing to vote. Almost two-thirds of world countries
were still colonies and as a result without a voice. “The South was excluded, and
not by choice” (Mutua 2016: 19). The UDHR drafting commission was led by
former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only non-Westerners on the
commission – Theo van Boven of Lebanon and P.C. Chang of China – were both
graduates from Ivy League schools in the United States, steeped in Western liberal
thought. Thus, they were more accurately part of the Westernized global elite and
not representative of alternative normative traditions of good society.
Not surprisingly, the UDHR did not disavow colonialism as a violation of
human rights. It is stated in the preamble that the rights enumerated in the UDHR
are applicable “both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among
the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.” Similarly, Article 2 of the doc-
ument failed to reject colonialism:

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62 REORIENT

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political
or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political,
jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person
belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other
limitation of sovereignty. (UN General Assembly 1948)

The US refusal, along with Australia, to accede to Japan’s proposal at the Paris
Peace Conference in 1919 for the addition of a racial equality clause to Article 21
of the Covenant of the League of Nations demanding equal status with Western
powers is a testament to the deep-rooted racism that was a feature of international
politics at the time. Ironically, Japan was not demanding Western powers to accept
racial equality as a general principle, but just as part of great power relations. The
US objection to the adoption of the racial equality clause was in fact indicative of
the racialized, hierarchical nature of the Western-dominated, colonialist interna-
tional order of the day (Shimazu 1998).
The UDHR, the normative bedrock of all forthcoming human rights covenants
and treaties, was accordingly born to a colonialist world order, with almost two-
thirds of world countries still under European colonial rule and thus without a
voice. Important to note, the world not only suffered from power imbalances in a
physical sense, it also suffered from an ideational imbalance of power. The “uni-
versal” human rights document was drafted by those representing the colonialist
powers, but more importantly it was drafted in their language and from their philo-
sophical point of view. First, the document failed to reject colonialism as a viola-
tion of human rights albeit by including a colonial clause that made the rights
applicable to colonial subjects as well. But more importantly, it set the Western
philosophical tradition of humanism, with human beings defined as individual
egoists, as the foundation for defining humanity and gauging the worth and dignity
of human beings and their relationship to society. As a result, UDHR perpetuated
the hierarchical colonizers’ model of the world, defining the West as natural and
the rest as barbarians and savages in need of being saved from their inferior status.
Such a mentality had been observed earlier in European colonizers’ relationship
with their colonies. One such example is the French giving the colonized Muslim
Algerians the chance to enjoy French civil rights on the condition that they relin-
quish adherence to the shari’ah, a condition many Algerians chose to forgo at the
expense of remaining second class human beings (McDougall 2017).
Western powers’ political will to hold on to the colonialist order despite the
adoption of the UDHR finds more evidence in their approach to later covenants
and treaties in which they sought to include colonial clauses, allowing colonial

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 63

powers to withhold rights to non-self-governing territories under their jurisdiction

if the colonizer so opted. This was especially important given the fact that, unlike
the nonbinding UDHR, later covenants and treaties would have a binding legal
status. “When inserted into an international treaty, this restrictive legal mechanism
could give a colonial power control over whether it extended or blocked the appli-
cation of that particular treaty with respect to its colonial territories” (Roberts
2014: 129). But more importantly, the existence of a colonial clause sought to
uphold the legality and compatibility of colonialism as a system with the notion of
human rights, something colonial subjects fought for decades to overcome.

Orientalism: The Grand Narrative of “Universal” Human Rights

Since its inception, just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was cele-
brated and hailed as a milestone toward peace and prosperity, critical voices were
muffled and muted. One such critical voice was that of the executive board of the
American Anthropological Association (The Executive Board 1947) which in a
statement criticized UDHR as it was being drafted. Recounting the West’s dark
history of colonialism and forced proselytization in its encounter with other cul-
tures, the statement read:

In the history of Western Europe and America, however, economic expansion,

control of armaments, and an evangelical religious tradition have translated the
recognition of cultural differences into a summons to action. This has been
emphasized by philosophical systems that have stressed absolutes in the realm of
values and ends. Definitions of freedom, concepts of the nature of human rights,
and the like, have thus been narrowly drawn. Alternatives have been decried, and
suppressed where controls have been established over non-European peoples. The
hard core of similarities between cultures has consistently been overlooked. The
consequences of this point of view have been disastrous for mankind. Doctrines of
the “white man’s burden” have been employed to implement economic
exploitation and to deny the right to control their own affairs to millions of peoples
over the world, where the expansion of Europe and America have not meant the
literal extermination of whole populations. (The Executive Board 1947: 540–1)

Noting the dark history of Western colonialism and exploitation based on

notions of cultural superiority, the statement asserts that the drawing up of a uni-
versal declaration of human rights in essence results in the rationalization, institu-
tionalization, and universalization of the hierarchical view of the world in terms of
a superior West against inferior others (The Executive Board 1947: 541). The
statement in essence encapsulates a critique of the Orientalist nature of the

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64 REORIENT

universal human rights discourse. The othering of non-European people as inferior

has been the lifeblood of the Western colonial project and the subsequent ascend-
ance of colonial powers in the international scene.
Orientalism, as a particular form of Eurocentrism, is a dominant ideological
element in Western relations with the rest of the world especially the Islamic
world (Said 1994; Hippler et al. 1995; Lawrence 1998; Karim 2003; Sayyid 2003).
Edward Said’s (1994) seminal critique of Orientalism has been used in various
fields of study including cultural studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory,
and recently in international relations as a platform for the critical examination of
US hegemony and identity politics (Nayak and Malone 2009). Orientalism
amounts to a discourse and knowledge that assumes a distinct social and cultural
reality about the Orient, discovered by the efforts of Orientalists and assumed to
be “true.” It is a reality that is different from its counterpart, the West (Said 1994).
At its most basic level, Orientalism marks a marriage between knowledge and
power marking Western powers’ exercise of domination at the ideational level to
control the meaning of the Orient, without which the physical struggle for control
over the Orient would have been impossible. Thus, Orientalism can be seen as the
cultural lifeblood of European colonialism and American imperialism. As an idea-
tional structure, Orientalism divides the world into the West and the East, giving
each essential characteristics, in which case the West is always superior, full, and
natural while the East is always and by definition inferior and in need of civilizing.
Through the objectification, dehumanization, inferiorization, and the othering of
the Orient, Orientalism facilitates a relationship of power, domination, and hegem-
ony between the West and its constructed Orients.
By the absolute fixing of the meaning of the Orient, its cultures, and peoples,
Orientalism functions as a Foucauldian discourse of power and domination, creat-
ing a body of knowledge that translates into unequal power relations. But also, in
the process of Western self-presentation, the Orient (and Islam for that matter) is
constructed as the West’s alter ego. The binary world created is necessary for the
perpetuation and fixing of the identity of the West and everything Western as
superior. The binary vocabulary of Orientalism includes East versus West, despot-
ism versus democracy, cruelty versus fair treatment, irrational versus rational, and
cunning versus trusting. Thus, putting everything together, Orientalism as a dis-
course does three things: it dichotomizes, essentializes, and creates hierarchies.
More than being “a play of meanings and ideas,” Orientalism has real effects
on the behavior of both the United States and the Oriental others it helps to con-
struct. As constructivist IR scholars posit, “the more we act toward an entity as
if it has a particular representation or meaning, the more that entity can take on
that representation” (Doty 1996; Wendt 1992 as cited in Nayak and Malone
2009: 256). In other words, the more the Orient becomes the subject of such

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 65

representations through Western ideas and practices, the more it will act in line
with those representations. A self-feeding cycle ensues. Therefore, American
Orientalism becomes the basis for the construction of the identities of the United
States and its Oriental others and, more importantly, serves as the basis of real
practice as in the case of human rights.
Nayak and Malone (2009: 256–7) thus summarize the effects of American
Orientalism on US international behavior:

The American variant of Orientalism allows for an analysis of the discursive

deployments in which (1) the United States assumes and relies upon an
ontological distinction between the United States and Others; (2) the United
States employs authoritative epistemological claims and representations about
Others’ bodies, habits, beliefs, feelings, and political sensibilities, thereby
justifying interventions, sanctions, and other actions within, across, and outside
its borders; and (3) US foreign policy relies on a rationalist methodology consisting
of finding “evidence,” such as reports and fact-finding missions, of foregone
conclusions about the Other and the United States need to assert its position.

Said’s (1994) application of Foucault’s discursive formations and Gramsci’s

hegemony, while providing a powerful critique against the validity and neutrality
of Orientalist claims about Islam, limit the possibility for a meaningful definition of
what Islam stands for. While Said is concerned with “the negation of Orientalism,”
his critique is not meant to provide an “affirmation of Islam.” As such, his negation
of Orientalism turns into a negation of Islam as well (Sayyid 2003: 35). Concurring
with Sayyid (2003: 39), I contend that if in attempting to go beyond Orientalism we
turn to anti-Orientalism, that is, the production of “a series of ‘little Islams’ reflect-
ing the various economic, ethnic and social factors of the variety of Muslim com-
munities,” we in effect downplay the importance of Islam as a societal force in
Muslim societies and fail to see the role it plays beyond a mere label. In contrast,
Sayyid (2003: 48) argues that Islam is best described as a master signifier:

Theorizing Islam as a master signifier avoids the essentialism of the Orientalist

approach, since Islam is not imposited with an historical essence. At the same
time this approach rejects the structuralism of anti-Orientalist accounts which,
by treating Islam as a superstructural moment, minimize its significance, and
thus have to resort to categories of “opportunism” and “false consciousness” to
try and account for the emergence of Islamism. Islamism, then, is a project which
attempts to transform Islam from a nodal point in discourses of Muslim
communities into a master signifier. In particular, the Islamist project is an
attempt to make Islam a master signifier of the political order.

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66 REORIENT

Islam operates as a master signifier on three grounds: “as din (faith), as dunya
(complete way of life) and as dawla (a state or political order)” (Sayyid 2003: 47).
In this way, while arguing for the appreciation of the real importance of Islam, one
does not negate the faults of Orientalism that Said criticized.
The destructive discourse of Orientalism has worked in tandem with the recon-
structive discourse of Eurocentric diffusionism, proclaiming the superiority of Europe
and its miraculous rise and arguing that all progress in non-European lands is the
result of the diffusion of European ideas and innovations (Blaut 1993, 2000). Thus, as
the lifeblood of colonialism, Orientalism’s destructive force on Oriental cultures and
on Islam was reinforced by the reconstructive force of Western powers’ attempts at
cultural transfer, what was later labeled as development and modernization. In the
case of the United States, Eurocentric diffusionism finds expression in terms of
American exceptionalism, which proclaims the United States’ unique place in his-
tory, its fundamental qualitative difference from all other countries especially the
non-Western ones, and a God-given mission and destiny to lead and guide the rest of
the world according to its values and worldview. It could be argued that American
exceptionalism is a “particular and specific form of Orientalism intended to produce
‘America’” (Nayak and Malone 2009: 253). Thus, the idea that modernization, work-
ing through the channels of Eurocentric diffusionism and American exceptionalism,
is the only means to development and democracy has a colonial legacy that today
finds expression in the “universal” human rights discourse and such instruments for
its institutionalization, such as the 2030 sustainable development goals.
Consequently, it is argued here that Orientalism and Eurocentrism together
play as the grand narrative of human rights creating unequal power relations
between the countries of the West, most importantly the United States, and the
Oriental other countries. This criticism questions the idea that “the specific cul-
tural and historical experiences of the West [are] the standard for all humanity”
(Mutua 2002: 64). As the latest example of Eurocentric diffusionism, the imposi-
tion of universality to Western human rights discourse results in the muting of
non-Western cultures, including those of the Orient. Rights are spoken most force-
fully in the language of liberalism, as in the case of political and civil rights, and
less potently in the language of socialism as in the case of the social/cultural/eco-
nomic rights. The international human rights corpus, including the nonbinding
UDHR and the binding covenants and treaties that followed, in essence institu-
tionalize the normative superiority of Western political ideologies. Critics ques-
tion the very Western notion of human rights based on the rights of an atomistic
individual pitted against society and state and instead argue that African and Asian
conceptions of humanity “is not that of an isolated and abstract individual, but an
integral member of a group animated by a spirit of solidarity” (Okere 1984, as
quoted in Mutua 2002: 65).

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 67

In the words of Talal Asad (2000), “human rights is part of a great work of
conversion” in which case the adherence to human rights norms is found in con-
currence with the increasing adoption of Western (or American) norms. It is a
process of cultural conversion infused with “games of power” in which certain
cultures and cultural practices are displaced at the expense of the ascendant
Western/modern culture imbued in the human rights discourse. What is important
is that this process of conversion does not happen spontaneously; rather, tradi-
tional cultures are coerced to convert to modern ones. In this sense, the tide of
human rights politics is the newest mode of the Eurocentric civilizing mission. It
is a work of “universal redemption.” The human rights project is in essence the
latest attempt at humanizing Oriental populations, redeeming them from their bar-
baric/savage modes of life.
In this sense, universalizing a Euroncentric vision of human rights is the latest
mutation of the white-man’s-burden. From this point of view, since 1945, the
United Nations, just like its predecessor the League of Nations, has been the main
vehicle for preserving a Western-centered global order. What is purported to be
universal is in essence “the universalization of principles and norms that are
European in identity” but are propagated as the “common standard of achievement
for all peoples and all nations” with the principal focus on “those rights that
strengthen, legitimize, and export the liberal democratic state to non-Western
societies” (Mutua 2002: 18).
The savages and the victims of this human rights discourse are for the most part
non-white and non-Western, while the saviors are white. At times, the discourse
serves as a self-redemption strategy to overcome the guilt of historical Western
savagery against non-whites. But this too is done within an Orientalist mindset.
The final goal is to redeem whites from their historical guilt “by ‘defending’ and
‘civilizing’ ‘lower,’ ‘unfortunate,’ and ‘inferior’ peoples” (Mutua 2002: 14).
To reverse this flawed mindset, “a historical understanding of the struggle for
human dignity should locate the impetus of a universal conception of human rights
in those societies subjected to European tyranny and imperialism” (Mutua 2002:
12). Examples of colonial subjects’ unacknowledged efforts for protecting human
dignity include anti-slavery campaigns both in Africa and in the United States, the
anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the struggles for
women’s suffrage and equal rights throughout the world.
Secondly, the “othering” process inherent in the Orientalist human rights out-
look aims at best to create “inferior clones, in effect dumb copies of the original”
upon the ruins of the original “savage” non-European cultures (Mutua 2002: 13).
This totalizing fixing of the vision of “the good society” in essence freezes the
chance for achieving any real multi-cultural human rights approach and inhibits
the achievement of any “cross-cultural legitimacy” for the so-called human rights

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68 REORIENT

corpus of values (Mutua 2002): “The critique of human rights should be based not
just on American or European legal traditions but also on other cultural milieus.
The indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the
Americas must be central to this critique” (Mutua 2002: 14). It is a call for the
world to go beyond the era of human rights marked by “European and American
senses of global predestination and the mission to civilize by universalizing
Eurocentric norms” (Mutua 2002: 15). This sense of civilizing mission and mani-
fest destiny for the United States is expressed in terms of American
exceptionalism.
It is important to note that the responsibility for insuring the diffusion of human
rights is placed solely on the sovereign states responsible for each country’s
national economy and international relations. Thus, adoption of human rights
norms becomes subject to issues of national interest and to power politics, with the
more powerful states, most notably the United States, taking all measures to insu-
late their domestic spheres from international scrutiny. More importantly, while
hegemonic powers have weaponized human rights against their perceived adver-
saries, their infliction of harm on other countries remains outside the purview of
human rights law.

Alternative Human Rights Discourses

The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990) is an example of an alter-

native human rights discourse. In the Nineteenth Islamic Conference of Foreign
Ministers, Muslim countries made an attempt to formulate a human rights docu-
ment based on Islamic principles. Based on the founding belief that human beings
are the vicegerents of God on earth and that Islamic human rights are conceivable
only within the framework of Shari’ah, the document makes an explicit denuncia-
tion of colonialism. Article 11 reads,

Colonialism of all types being one of the most evil forms of enslavement is totally
prohibited. Peoples suffering from colonialism have the full right to freedom and
self-determination. It is the duty of all States peoples to support the struggle of
colonized peoples for the liquidation of all forms of and occupation, and all States
and peoples have the right to preserve their independent identity and control
over their wealth and natural resources.

The idea of Islamic human rights could level a real challenge to Eurocentrism
and Orientalism disrupting the uneven power relations that have been built upon
the two foundations. With the leadership of Imam Khomeini (RA), the Islamic
Revolution set the stage for such a prospect. According to Sayyid (2003: 113–14),

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 69

“it is only with [Imam] Khomeini that the role of Western discourse as universal
interlocutor appears to be shaken.”
Promotion of Eurocentric notions of human rights as universal is an attempt at
restoring the idea that the only path to progress passes through the West. Achieving
any meaningful Islamic human rights regime requires the courage and political
will to deconstruct such notions of progress. Again Sayyid’s (2003: 114) words
are very relevant here:

The possibility of Islamic political thinking can only be undertaken by

disengagement with the problems and perspectives of Western political thought.
As long as Islamic political thinkers are locked in a (one-sided) conversation with
Western political thought, they remain locked in a logic in which there is no space
for anything other than the West.

To decolonize the self-proclaimed “universal,” Eurocentric human rights dis-

course, critical Muslim thinkers should move beyond a minimalist approach to
development, in general, and to Islamic human rights, in particular. In a minimal-
ist discourse of Islamic human rights, all the elements of the so-called universal
human rights regime are affirmed except when in clear contradiction to the
Shari’ah while retaining a language that otherwise very much mirrors that of the
UDHR. In recent years, a maximalist discourse is gaining grounds in Muslim
countries which finds the main problem with the hegemonic discourse of
Eurocentric human rights in the fixing of “a Eurocentric notion of what a human
being is and what humanity is and its place in creation” (Merali 2017b: 23). Merali
(2017a: 6) criticizes the minimalist “Islamic human rights” works for attempting
“to marry the two discourses [i.e. the UDHR and Islam], oftentimes subsuming
and internalizing UDHR norms within Islamic terminology accepting without
criticism the normative value, supremacy and universality of said norms.”
A clear attempt at setting free from the epistemic violence of the Eurocentric
discourse of UDHR is taking place in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the very
notion of development is being revamped in favor of a fully Islamic notion of
progress which is also sensitive to the particularities of the Iranian circumstances.
Called the Islamic-Iranian Model of Progress, the goal is to decenter the Western-
centered notion of development, which is also the background against which “uni-
versal” human rights are defined.
The model was called for in a four-hour conference on the issue hosted by
Islamic Revolution Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in 2010 in which he asked univer-
sity and seminary intellectuals to work toward arriving at a “master, comprehen-
sive plan” that deals with the four realms of intellect, science, lifestyle, and
spirituality, making human salvation its central aim and considering historical,

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70 REORIENT

geographical, cultural, economic, and social conditions of Iran (“Islamic-Iranian

Model of Progress Called for” 2010). Ayatollah Khamenei said “progress” has
been used intentionally instead of the notion of “development” which connotes the
aspirations, values, and methods of the West and which constrain the Islamic
Revolution’s ideas and beliefs. In this model, culture replaces the economy as the
base, thereby transforming the idea of human wellbeing from mere economic
growth to a more holistic-Islamic concept. The discursive transformation of what
progress entails would in turn transform a Western-oriented discourse on good-
governance and welfare, changing the conceptualization and the operationaliza-
tion of economic, social, and cultural rights.

American Exceptionalism and Human Rights

While the United States was an early supporter of the UDHR, by 1953, it withdrew
from the drafting of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
(ICESCR). Fearing international scrutiny of the racism inherent in American cul-
ture and politics, the United States refused to participate in human rights standard
setting (Mutua 2016). From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the American gov-
ernment sponsored the social scientific promotion of modernization theory as the
means for the postcolonial world’s economic, political, and social transformation
(Gilman 2003: 5), which represents “the most explicit and systematic blueprint
ever created by Americans for reshaping foreign societies.”
In a time when the Western world had lost its physical grip on the colonized
societies, modernization theory served as the blueprint for manipulating how
those societies were shaped in the postcolonial world. “For modernization theo-
rists, in contrast to strict economic development theorists, modernity was not
just about a way of organizing economic production, but also about society and
polity, cultural norms and forms” (Gilman 2003: 6). It was a reconstruction pro-
ject based on the Western model. These theorists redefined modernity from one
that described a specific European historical period to one that encapsulated a
universal way to progress.
US foreign policy in the period between the drafting of UDHR until the Vietnam
quagmire remained aloof and at times antagonistic with regard to human rights.
The discourse of modernization theory marked US relations with the Third World
including the Muslim world. In the domestic sphere, the United States attempted
to both have its cake and eat it too. The United States both claimed ownership of
human rights as a doctrine that was best enshrined in the American constitution
and at the same time tried to insulate its domestic sphere from incursion. It contin-
ued racist policies that undermined the very humanity of a large segment of the

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 71

American population. The United States, like other imperialist powers, aimed to
restrict human rights’ erosion of its sovereignty by first attempting to include a
“federal-state clause” similar to the colonial clause (Roberts 2014) and later refus-
ing to ratify human rights legal codes.
The United States uses American exceptionalism to bypass the international
legal human rights regime in three ways: (1) exemptionalism, wherein “the United
States signs on to international human rights and humanitarian law treaties and
then exempts itself from their provisions by explicit reservation, nonratification,
or non-compliance”; (2) double standards, or judging “enemies” more harshly
than oneself or one’s allies; and (3) “legal isolationism,” or denying the interna-
tional jurisdiction of human rights law within its domestic law (Ignatieff 2005: 3).
The United States ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide in 1986, almost 40 years after its adoption in 1948 by the
United Nations. The United States signed the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1966 but withheld its ratifi-
cation until 1994 (29 years after its adoption by the United Nations). Similarly, the
United States ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in
1992, 26 years after its adoption by the UN and 15 years after becoming a signa-
tory to the covenant (Ignatieff 2005).
What kept the United States from ratifying human rights international legal
codes was American elites’ fear of internationalizing US domestic crises such as
the civil rights/anti-racism movement as a human rights issue. As an example, in
their analysis of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Racial Discrimination in the 1960s, US senators were concerned that the ratifica-
tion of the covenant would nullify thousands of discriminatory laws in the United
States (Moravcsik 2005).
Eventually, it took the hard fought battle of a few opposing senators to achieve
the however late ratification of several human rights legal codes. Senator William
Proxmire (11 November 1915 to 15 December 2005), a Democrat from Wisconsin,
for example, saw United States’ refusal to ratify the UN anti-genocide convention as
a “national shame” and made it a priority of his time in the Senate to fight for the
ratification of the treaty. From 1967, he vowed to deliver a speech every day on the
Senate floor in this regard and made 3211 speeches in the next 19 years to come.
Proxmire’s opponents were alarmed that US ratification of the treaty would compli-
cate the Vietnam War and control over the Civil Rights movement (Backes 2010).
These fears, of course, were not baseless since African American leaders led by
the NAACP were working to initiate a human rights movement to bring the plight
of the American Black community before the United Nations. The “prize” they
sought was to use the international human rights legal codes “to address not only
the political and legal inequality, but also the education, health care, housing, and

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72 REORIENT

employment needs that haunted the black community” (Anderson 2003: i). With
the onset of the Cold War and the anti-Communist sentiment in the United States,
opponents successfully tainted the NAACP’s efforts as un-American and Soviet-
backed. Eventually, the Black struggle retreated to a narrow civil rights agenda
(Anderson 2003).
Not surprisingly, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassi-
nated as they were advocating the idea of internationalizing the issue of American
racial discrimination as a human rights struggle (Jackson 2013; Singh 2015).
Malcolm X

spent time in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, Guinea, and
Ethiopia on this trip, and met with many African leaders and writers, including
several heads of state: Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, and
Sekou Toure. After he addressed the Kenyan Parliament, it passed a “resolution of
support for our human rights struggle.” (Singh 2015)

To make international human rights laws harmless, the United States first
delays ratification for decades. In every human rights treaty that has been ratified,
every effort has been taken through the imposition of reservations, understand-
ings, and declarations (RUDs) to make them “non-self-executing” in the United
States. This means that federal-level implementing or enabling legislation is
needed to make the treaties domestically enforceable. Furthermore, the United
States refuses to accept the jurisdiction of international human rights enforcement
tribunals (Moravcsik 2005). As a result, the United States remains exceptional in
the sense that it does not allow its citizens to raise human rights litigations in
domestic and international courts based on what it advocates as the “universal”
human rights regime. Table 1 shows the status of the United States with regard to
international human rights treaties.

Table 1 The status of United States’ ratification of international human rights treaties

Human Rights Instrument : (Date into force) Ratification Status Declaration

International Convention on the Elimination of All Signature: 1966, ✓

Forms of Racial Discrimination: 1969 Ratification/Accession: 1994

International Covenant on Civil and Signature: 1977, ✓

Political Rights: 1976 Ratification/Accession: 1992

Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Signature: NA, Ratification/

Civil and Political Rights: 1976 Accession: NA

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 73

Human Rights Instrument : (Date into force) Ratification Status Declaration

Second Optional Protocol to the International Signature: NA, Ratification/

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the Accession: NA
abolition of the death penalty: 1991

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Signature: 1977,

Cultural Rights: 1976 Ratification/Accession: NA

Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Signature: NA, Ratification/

Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: 2013 Accession: NA

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Signature: 1980,

Discrimination against Women: 1981 Ratification/Accession: NA

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Signature: NA, Ratification/

Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Accession: NA
Women: 2000

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Signature: 1988, ✓

Degrading Treatment or Punishment: 1987 Ratification/Accession: 1994

Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture Signature: NA, Ratification/

and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Accession: NA
Punishment: 2006

Convention on the Rights of the Child: 1990 Signature: 1995,

Ratification/Accession: NA

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights Signature: 2000, ✓

of the Child on the involvement of children in armed Ratification/Accession: 2002
conflict: 2002

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Signature: 2000, ✓

the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution Ratification/Accession: 2002
and child pornography: 2002

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Signature: NA, Ratification/

the Child on a communications procedure: 2014 Accession: NA

International Convention on the Protection of the Signature: NA, Ratification/

Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Accession: NA
Families: 2003

International Convention for the Protection of all Signature: NA, Ratification/

Persons from Enforced Disappearance: 2010 Accession: NA

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Signature: 2009,

Disabilities: 2008 Ratification/Accession: NA

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Signature: NA, Ratification/

Persons with Disabilities: 2008 Accession: NA
Source: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner available at [Link]

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74 REORIENT

Refusing to make itself accountable in terms of international human rights law,

the United States often uses human rights as the means to pressure adversaries.
Human rights erupted into the mainstream of public debate only because two quite
distinct needs came together. On one side, a profound revulsion over the Vietnam
War led to the weakening of the anti-Communist consensus. Appalled by Cold War
rationales and tactics (overthrowing regimes, assassinating leaders, training tortur-
ers, supporting dictatorships), human rights advocates mobilized against both
American “excesses” and Soviet “crimes,” documenting in particular the atrocities
of American-backed military regimes throughout Latin America, from Guatemala to
Chile (Peck 2011: 6).
On the other, Washington was desperate for an alternative ideological justifica-
tion for its global strategies. It is at this juncture that the United States begins to
use a rights-based discourse in advancing its foreign policies abroad. National
security imperatives eventually gave rise to “a new humanitarian ethos legitimiz-
ing massive interventions – including war” in the 1990s (Peck 2011). This is the
beginning of the era of the so-called humanitarian interventions. Here, as was
noted by Mutua (2002), the emphasis is often on civil and political rights, ignoring
crimes of economic injustice, aggression, and occupation. US national/global
interests guide how human rights are weaponized.
While using the human rights motive as a justification claim for hostile interven-
tions against adversaries, the United States makes every effort to sabotage interna-
tional actions against human rights violations in client states especially the Israeli
regime. In 2017, Richard Falk and Virginia Tilly wrote an investigative report for
the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia entitled “Israeli prac-
tices toward the Palestinian people and the question of apartheid.” The report had
made the conclusion that “the weight of the evidence supports beyond a reasonable
doubt the proposition that Israel is guilty of imposing an apartheid regime on the
Palestinian people, which amounts to the commission of a crime against humanity”
(Falk and Tilly 2017: 6). Under American pressure, UN chief Antonió Guterres
rejected the report as anti-Semitic and withdrew UN sponsorship of the report.
Against this instrumental current of official Washington rights-based ideology,
runs a grassroots current for human rights in the United States and around the
world:

[This second human rights current] has less to do with individual freedom and
more to do with basic needs. It is associated with popular mass movements,
revolution by populations in desperate straits, and resistance. . . . Central to the
second current are challenges to corporate power, state repression, foreign
occupation, and global economic inequality, as well as the protection of collective
means of struggle, from labor unions to revolution. (Peck 2011: 9)

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DECOLONIZING THE “UNIVERSAL” HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME 75

From this perspective, the struggle for human rights is a struggle for justice
rather than a struggle for exporting liberal democracy.
As is evident from Table 1 above, one of the most important human rights laws
that remain to be ratified in the United States is the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (signed in 1977). A myriad of grassroots
organizations are working in the United States to push Washington into ratifying
the covenant as a first step toward achieving economic justice.
The current American political, economic, and ideological climate is so antago-
nistic to the ratification of ICESCR, according to Piccard (2010: 248), that

the United States is no closer than it was twenty years ago to accepting that its
citizens might, or should, have rights to food, clothing and housing, the right of
access to physical and mental health care, and the right to education.

Piccard further argues for ICESCR’s ratification by noting,

If, in forty years of waging a war on poverty, we as a nation have proven ourselves
incapable of reducing (let alone eradicating) poverty, it may well be time to
acknowledge the need to internalize international standards that will, over time,
become a part of our national culture. (Piccard 2010: 251)

Such has become the main struggle of organizations such as the New York-based
Center for Economic and Social Rights ([Link] With regard to the
United States, CESR notes, “The United States stands virtually alone in the world as
an opponent of economic and social rights” (“United States,” CESR). An indication of
this claim is the fact that “the U.S. Supreme Court, moreover, has never ruled that poor
people constitute a protected group (‘suspect class’), and thus there remains no funda-
mental right to subsistence in U.S. law” (Libal and Hertel 2011: 2). According to Libal
and Hertel (2011: 6), the United States is witnessing a new tide of human rights strug-
gle led by “a dynamic new universe of lawyers and grassroots activists.” A movement
may well be under way perhaps as potent as the civil rights movement. The works of
these progressive activists and international NGOs such as CESR promise an opening
for undoing the Eurocentric grip on the conceptualization of human rights.

Conclusion

This article was an attempt to problematize the current human rights regime based on the
notions of Orientalism and Eurocentrism. An unquestioned acceptance of so-called uni-
versal human rights, however, would result in the locking of Islamic thinkers in a one-
sided conversation with Western political thought. As such, Islam loses all potential for

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76 REORIENT

building a civilization independent of the West. The idea of Islamic human rights should
act as a real challenge to Eurocentrism and Orientalism with the aim of disrupting the
uneven power relations that have been built upon the two foundations. It is this critique
of the West’s monopoly on development and success that should be the driving force for
Islamic human rights. Islamic human rights should be “post-Orientalist,” to use Sayyid’s
(2014: 13) terminology, “decentering the sign of the West,” an endeavor that centers
about the “name” of Islam.
As long as the universality, inevitability, and naturalness of Western cultural for-
mations and values are questioned, the West faces problems in imposing its hegem-
ony over the rest of the world, including the Muslim world. Therefore, the power of
Islamic human rights resides in its “critique of the assumption that the royal road to
a better future is pioneered by the West” (Sayyid 2003: 290). Islamic thinkers will
find solidarity with progressive activists around the world in their struggles to keep
great powers accountable for the plight of their people and other people around the
world. Such a paradigmatic challenge to the Western project of human rights requires
a movement away from the apologetic approach of some in the Muslim world. The
success of the struggle for Islamic human rights depends on unlocking Muslim
minds of the supremacy and inevitability of Western political thought. Only then is
the possibility of Muslim subjectivity as a political agent achievable.

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