‘Thus, as it is always darkest just before the day dawneth, so God useth to visit His servants with greatest afflictions when he intendeth their speedy advancement,’ English theologian Thomas Fuller wrote in his 1650 work A Pisgah Site of Palestine. 1 It is taken for granted that the darkest hour precedes the break of dawn. But this logic is not similarly applied to a reading of world events, especially those most grim. Fuller also suggested that those most in need call for speedy relief. It is not to say that the afflicted see their situation ameliorated overnight, but that the very gravity of their plight is that which gives impetus to a remedy. Just as the two world wars created urgency for the drafting of the UN Charter and International Bill of Rights, so too did the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki breed the ‘nuclear taboo,’ making the use of nuclear weapons unthinkable in the current age. 2
Coming to an agreement on universal codes of conduct based on fundamental human rights following the Second World War, the international community inaugurated a new paradigm for more civil and humane international relations and diplomacy. This would also provide a promising model for the future European Union to live by in the aftermath of two devastating continental wars. Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 expressly states that, ‘everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration can be fully realized.’ However, the world order called for under the UDHR remains largely aspirational. Regional legal systems such as the European Convention on Human Rights along with its accompanying European Court of Human Rights have stepped in to heed the UDHR mandate and to fill the perceived human rights enforcement gap. While comparable human rights schemes have also arisen in other regions around the globe, namely the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Asian Human Rights People’s Charter, and the Arab Charter on Human Rights, they have each taken on distinct forms and functions, some less and some more developed than the next. These regional mechanisms, collectively rooted as they are in the international rights regime, demonstrate a move towards a more unified, albeit imperfect, global human rights order. This supports a view that universal human rights are gaining more traction globally, following the establishment of the international rights system. 3 However, this assumption is predominately reserved for Western-democratic societies. Middle Eastern societies, by contrast, are assumed to be exceptional in nature, and impervious to liberalizing trends. It is therefore essential to acknowledge the Middle East’s underappreciated contributions to the international system, as well as to recognize the existence of the region’s endogenous human rights culture and history of progressive openings.
The Middle East and North African (MENA) region in question spans from North-Eastern Africa to South-Western Asia, including all Arab League countries with the addition of Turkey, Iran and Israel/Palestine, and in some cases, Afghanistan and Pakistan. While the parameters of the greater Middle East are a product of foreign design and penmanship, the common historical, cultural and religious threads running throughout make for a more or less coherent regional structure. The shared geopolitical fate of the countries of the Middle East-North Africa and Persian Gulf means that they must necessarily be examined within their regional and international context.
Just as the Middle East is not a monolithic structure, neither is Islam—the dominant religion and major point of cultural reference in the Middle East. Tracking regional normative convergence does not seek to detract from the diversity that spans across cultural, religious, and national borders. Neither does it seek to locate a singular, definitive Islamic or Middle Eastern stance on human rights. Divergence on human rights principles and practices, however, does not make the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East inherently inhospitable to human rights norms.
The fact that the Middle East has long been the locus of political contention complicates the task of viewing the region objectively, let alone positively. A failure to grasp the historical and political forces, which shape and shift the behavior and interests of Middle Eastern states, leads to false conclusions about the region. Yet the twisted geopolitical maze of the Middle East need not be a deterrent to its proper study. Navigating this bumpy terrain is indispensable to the task of mapping the trajectory of right-based progress within the Middle East. Much has been written about the compatibility of Islamic ideologies and human rights as well as issues of constitutionalism and liberalism, generally, of which human rights is deemed to be part. Moreover, the existing scholarship on this topic deals primarily with the perceived human rights deficits in the Middle East. Considerably less attention is paid to the fledgling human rights culture in a region otherwise known for its widespread instability and freedom deficit.
Approaching the region from a human rights framework reveals a picture that appears to be largely at odds with international human rights standards. As it stands, the region has a poor human rights record, and socio-economic development has been retarded by the rise of autocratic and unrepresentative regimes following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and foreign imposition of a haphazard nation-state system in the region. According to the four-part series of Arab Human Development reports from 2002 to 2005—a joint venture of the United Nations Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development—the situation in the Arab world falls well below certain benchmarks set by United Nations treaty bodies. Additionally, ‘violations of individual and collective human rights resulting from occupation and armed domestic conflicts worsened during the period under review,’ with ‘public freedoms in the region, especially those of opinion and expression, coming under further pressure.’ 4
The first of these reports identifies ‘three critical development “deficits”—in the acquisition of knowledge, in political freedoms, and in women’s rights—that have held back human development throughout the Arab region despite considerable natural wealth and great potential for economic and social progress.’ 5 The second and third reports focuses on the deficits in knowledge and freedom, respectively. The final report in the series, predating the 2011 ‘Arab Awakening,’ hypothesizes that the realization of an ‘Arab Renaissance’ hinges upon the proper empowerment of women, including greater access to education and healthcare.
While only passing mention is made of the region’s more positive achievements in human development, such as in the area of women’s rights and political participation, the UNDP reports primarily set out to address what the UN perceives as the shortcomings inherent within Arab institutional structures. Given the stated aim of the development reports to focus on the deficits of Arab countries with respect to human rights and freedoms, these deficiencies dominate the overall impression of the region. The latest UNDP Arab Human Development Report released in 2016, which is primarily focused on the youth demographic in the MENA region, also reaffirms the findings of the initial reports over a decade later. 6
Although the UNDP reports have managed to bring important issue areas to the fore, while generating a list of informed suggestions for reform, they still perpetuate a negative view of the Middle East region’s prospects for progress. They buttress a view of the region as inimical to human development and progress by affirming that, ‘by twenty first century standards, Arab countries have not met the Arab people’s aspirations for development, security and liberation.’ 7 Even if the Middle East fails to satisfactorily meet the threshold of liberal-democratic standards, this does not automatically mean that human rights norms have failed to take root across the region. Tracking the more constructive contributions of the region is essential to overcoming this limited and limiting perception. Nonetheless, more comprehensive knowledge of the Middle East’s past and present role in the development of the international human rights system challenges cultural relativist myths as to the fundamental incompatibility of universal human rights norms with the cultural and religious principles of the Middle East.
The fixation on documenting the human rights violations of non-Western societies, particularly the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East, reflects the imbalanced application of the international human rights rubric. Talal Asad, in his anthropological enquiry on human rights, has asked why, ‘in the torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro-America’? 8 He attributes this imbalance, first and foremost, to the ‘hypocrisy of Western powers.’
Not all countries have to equally answer for their egregious human rights violations, with some having to find clever ways to dodge accusations. These tensions reveal that the United Nations, which was initially established with the goal of treating all member states as equals, has since gone on to serve as a political fighting ground for Eastern and Western states alike. In turn, this mistrustful environment gives certain states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran a loophole to disregard certain human rights on grounds that they represent Western double standards, and are not adequately sensitive to Eastern cultural ways. 9 Feeling themselves to be unjustly persecuted or singled-out by the international community, they are therefore more likely to respond with impunity than with integrity in their handling of human rights at home.
Beyond the existence of a dual standard in evaluating human rights internationally, however, the securitization of the Middle East question further complicates the debate on human rights and the Middle East. The Middle East may also appear a curious choice of study as far as human rights regimes are concerned. Yet, the securitized nature of the debate only highlights the greater need for principled and judicious deliberation on the topic. 10 The fact that the Middle East is the current day battleground for Western geopolitical interests should not preclude the region from being studied on its own merits. Likewise, the fact that human rights are generally considered to be Western concepts should not preclude Eastern regions from being studied for their legitimate contributions to the evolution of human rights norms, or as a basis to challenge that assumption. While making generalizations can be useful for the sake of theoretical clarity and simplicity, it occasionally works to obfuscate significant details from the greater picture.
All in all, the portrait painted of the MENA region’s human rights situation by independent observers is a bleak one. The raft of repression and rights violations in Middle Eastern countries would on the surface seem to indicate an overall regression in the area of human rights and freedoms. This helps perpetuate the perception of the MENA region as intrinsically and permanently troubled. It is essential to debunk obsolete cultural relativist arguments against the universality of human rights to reveal how such objections are often politically and not culturally motivated. Religion and culture are not the primary impediments to the realization of human rights and freedoms in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East. Proof of this is in the extent to which the rights discourse has already permeated Middle East life and politics. This goes to show that human rights norms are not exclusive to Western so...