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Selective adaptation describes the process by which international legal rules are contextualized to local conditions. The institutional and cultural contexts for selective adaptation involve a process by which non-local institutional practices and organizational forms are mediated by local norms. This process can be illustrated by reference to the local implementation of international human rights regimes.<br /> Selective adaptation is made possible by ways in which governments, elites, and other interpretive communities express their own normative preferences in the course of interpretation and application of practice rules. Selective adaptation depends on a number of factors, including perception, complementarity, and legitimacy. Perception influences understanding about foreign and local norms and practices. Originally a principle of nuclear physics, complementarity describes a circumstance by which apparently contradictory phenomena can be combined in ways that preserve essential characteristics of each component and yet allow for them to operate together in a mutually reinforcing and effective manner.

One of the major challenges for a civilization - and a parameter for assessing it - is how it treats those who do not belong to that civilization. The dichotomy between “we” and “them” is made variously across civilizations. In the past, interactions across civilizations are less voluminous and less intense.  But things have changed. The world has become a global village. Yet, it remains very pluralistic in terms of religion, culture, ethnicity, and language. The diversity of the contemporary world is due to the existence of concurrent civilizations on the world, each with its distinct culture, world view and values. Western culture, Islamic culture, oriental culture and African culture are some of the more prominent cultures today. Globalization is not without its problems. For one thing, the world is being pressurized into become a mono-cultural environment patterned after western culture. This position is not because of any inherent superiority of western civilization to the other civilization but because of the cultural invasion of the world by the west.   Information flow is the world has been essentially one way - from the west to the rest. The quest for peace in the modern world must therefore address how the diverse cultures of the world are accommodated, first within specific civilizations and secondly in the world at a global level particularly within the context of the United Nations. The past offers a good lesson for the future. This paper looks at how three civilizations – Islamic, African, and western - in their pristine historical and modern forms - have approached otherness. Islamic civilization emerged from a multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment.  The Islamic approach is one of tolerance and respect for otherness in spite of the full conviction of the rightness of its religious creed and way of life.  Islam recognizes the freedom of religion for non-Muslims and expresses this in a comprehensive and complete manner. It does not impose its laws or culture on them but grants social, cultural and judicial autonomy to these strangers within its borders. This attitude which was in the past is still observable in some modern Islamic countries such as Iran. African culture is a very diverse affair. The common traits amongst Africans include their warm treatment of strangers and their respect for the cultural independence of other peoples.  The attitude of western civilization contrasts with the attitudes of Islamic and African civilizations.  The West has consistently pursued a policy of domination of other peoples based on its perceived superiority over them. This attitude, for which various ideological and intellectual justifications have been advanced in defense of, remains in contemporary times, a constant source of friction and tension. It is suggested that models provided by Islamic and African cultures be used as a basis for modern interaction by persons belonging to different cultures.

The Enlightenment's distinction between positive and natural religion furnishes a useful point of departure for thinking about the relationship, in today's world, between religion and human rights.  According to eighteenth century rationalism, natural religion consists in the simplest form of those beliefs that reason can admit to without contradiction, such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul (Voltaire); whereas positive religions are merely the multitude of diverging institutions, dogmas, ceremonies and beliefs that human beings have created for themselves during the course of history.  In natural religion, consciousness finds divinity within itself, and thus is co-responsible for the laws that it constructs and obeys; in positive religion, God imposes His commands from without.  Despite their differences, however, both forms of religion rely on the same conception of temporality to make their claims understood:  they conceive of time as a pure linear sequence (t1, t2, t3, etc.) that is divided into the tripartite form of past, present, and future.  For positive religion, this structure supports the existence of a well-formed past-time during which sacred grounds for respecting human rights were first revealed to a privileged founder; the record of this past-time, in the form of holy writ, then becomes a stable meaning which is thought to ground (and require) any subsequent action that aspires to be righteous.  And while natural religion, for its part, attempts to avoid dogmatism by permitting practical reason to deduce right action from the God-given moral law within, the very concept of deduction in general entails the same tripartite structure of time:  that is, rational people can lay down the law for themselves only in a past-time which, even if it is very recent, must always precede (and hence pre-authorize) the rightness of all right action. According to positive religion, God gives people moral laws; according to natural religion, God gives them a faculty (reason) that allows them to produce valid moral laws for themselves.  Just like the conventional idea of positive law in general, both forms of religion display a kind of pre-rational "faith," so to speak, in what can and should happen after the moral law comes into being.  That is, law, natural religion, and positive religion all adhere to the proposition that the past in general—and appropriately sanctioned human rights norms, in particular—can provide a secure foundation for right action, both in the present and in the future. <br />But of course philosophers are hardly ever univocal when it comes to this or any other topic.  Against the foregoing conventional interpretation of time, Western thought has also delivered us an altogether different concept of temporality, one that supplants sequential time's staid historiography of dates, laws and eras with the notion of "historical" time (Heidegger).  The latter is characterized by the sheer persistence of a unitary spatial-temporal milieu that ceaselessly reproduces itself.  Although this unity supports all modes of becoming, it provides no stable pause, or platform, on which a secure foundation for action could ever be established definitively, once and for all (Nietzsche).  To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the concept of this sort of temporality holds that the true site of history is not homogeneous, empty time, but rather time filled by the presence of the now (Die Jetztzeit).  From this point of view, time does not "pass"; rather, human beings are seen as living their entire lives in (or as) a now-time in which they are caught, inescapably, between the warring forces of past and future.  Franz Kafka's extraordinary parable, He, paints an image that vividly illustrates this concept of time: <br />  <br />He has two antagonists:  the first presses him from behind, from the origin.  The second blocks the road ahead.  He gives battle to both.  To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back.  But it is only theoretically so.  For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions?  His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded momentCand this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yetChe will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. <br />Kafka's man is a figure for human freedom:  the fateful "place," as it were, where the struggle between past and future eternally transpires.  But this human freedom should not be confused with the kind in which reason lays down or acknowledges universal laws that then warrant the rightness of future actions (Kant), or even with the kind of Hegelian freedom that permits the individual to recognize and identify with the rational universal that is immanent within the institutions of his time and place.  Nor is this a non-rational, religious, sort of freedom, founded on grace or revelation, by means of which one can let oneself become a vehicle for accomplishing God's will (Meister Eckhart).  Rather, the kind of freedom that besets the man in Kafka's parable is tragic, in the precise Greek sense that it betrays itself as un-free and self-defeating whatever it does.  This is why the man dreams, impossibly, of escaping from the fighting line, for having to constantly experience oneself as the living site of a tragic confrontation between past and future is far less comforting than resting on the self-certain knowledge that one's actions are grounded on an absolute and indubitable foundation. <br />The difference between historiographical time and historical time corresponds to the differences between subservience and freedom, thought and action, and determinacy and indeterminacy.  Linear time attempts to reconcile reason and history by giving human rights a proper ground; but as Goethe says, in the beginning was the deed, not the word.  Unitary time is history by providing a site for the inherently groundless enactment of human rights; but as Kant says, intuitions without concepts are blind.  This essay elucidates the rich contrast between these two modes of temporality, and meditates on their significance for the task of thinking about the relationship between religion and human rights.

There has been a great deal written about the relationship between sharia law and international human rights law, particularly with regards to the treatment of women.  The tensions between sharia law and international law norms of equality and non-discrimination have been well documented, and the possibilities for interpreting sharia law in a manner that accords with international human rights law have been insightfully explored by scholars of human rights and Islamic law. It has been shown that Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, justice and equality.  It has been said that the Qur’anic passages describing the role of women should be understood in the context in which they were written, which was a time in history in which women were seen as vastly inferior to men in almost every society throughout the world, particularly in the Arabian peninsula.  Read in this context, it is argued, Islam must be seen as an advocate for gender equality, and should thus be interpreted as standing for gender equality today. This paper argues that, while this may indeed be the preferred interpretation of Islam, this is of little assistance to women in countries such as Sudan whose national legislation enshrines and enforces the most discriminatory aspects of sharia law. 

An underlying theoretical point of this paper has been that if fundamental commitments and the questions of cultural identity that they bring with them (What is an X?) are understood in terms of functional analyses of the kind I have tried to give in the case of Islamic identity today, then there is scope to see these commitments as susceptible to various criticisms in the particular context of a conflict in which they might figure.  All this seems to me to offer far more scope and interest to moral philosophy than Williams allows it, even after granting to Williams the validity of the central role he gives to the idea of fundamental commitment and the validity of his critique of traditional moral philosophy. <br />  The paper has studied the question "What is a Muslim?" in the dialectic of a conflict arising out of a concern for Islamic Reform.  The conflict is one that arises because of moderate Muslims' fundamental commitment to a doctrine which contains features that are often effectively invoked by the absolutists whom moderate Muslims fundamentally oppose.  If a full analysis of the commitment reveals its defensive function which have disabled Muslims from a creative and powerful opposition to the absolutists, and if, moreover, this function of the commitment is diagnosed as itself based on a deep but common philosophical fallacy, it should be possible then for moderate Muslims to think there way out of this conflict and to transform the nature of their commitment to Islam, so that it is not disabling in that way. <br />The question of identity, "What is a Muslim?", then, will get very different answers before and after this dialectic about reform has played itself out.   The dialectic, thus, preserves the negotiability of the concept of identity and the methodological points I began with, at the same time as it situates and explains the urgency and fascination that such questions hold for us.

Human rights and religion can very often be seen as reinforcing one another. Therefore, religion plays a primordial role in promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. For example, moral imperatives like “do not take any human being's life” or “you shall not steal” can be found in all major religions of the world, and have acted as an inspiration for the fundamental laws made by man. <br />None the less, religious laws can also contradict man-made laws and human rights treaties. Just to take one example, according to the Christian faith it is impossible for a woman to become a priest, while multiple human rights treaties clearly prohibit discrimination between the sexes. <br />It is precisely in such contentious matters that the national State will often intervene, granting preferential treatment to either religious laws or man-made treaties. The State, however, when it does interfere, has to do so in a very careful way, for one fundamental right is the right to religious freedom. The State will therefore frequently have to try to strike a balance between this right and other human rights concerned. <br />One regional convention safeguarding both religious rights like freedom of religion and religious practice, as other fundamental rights, is the European Convention of Human Rights, which we will explore in this paper. States that are members of the Council of Europe and parties to this convention will have to try to find a balance while being watched by an observant European Court of Human Rights. Thus the task of finding a balance between these rights has in Europe ultimately been given to the European Court, and its case-law is especially illuminating on the very relation between these rights. Looking at this jurisprudence will enable us to find out how the relationship between religious rights and other fundamental freedoms is perceived in the European Human Rights system. One essential question that arises, is in what manner and to what extent the Court allows for limitations and exceptions on/to other human rights when it comes to religious matters. For example, can one’s personal freedom be limited in order to preserve someone else’s religious beliefs? Does the European Court deviate from its normal course of action when faced with religious cases? Does such a religious context constitute “special circumstances” that allow for a different treatment, and if so, can this be justified? And on the other hand, what are the ultimate boundaries that other human rights put on religion, religious rights and traditions? Where is the line drawn? <br />The purpose of this study is to explore the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in search of an answer to this fundamental question. Rather than solely concentrating on the right to freedom of religion of article 9 ECHR, this paper will focus more on those other human rights contained in the Convention when they seem to conflict with the said right to religious freedom, and in a broader scope, with other religious rights, laws and practices. The jurisprudence of the Court, which seems to take a very nuanced position in such matters, will be examined. A study of this case-law will not only be helpful to explore the status of religious rights as compared to other fundamental rights, but may also be a source of inspiration for the international human rights system to promote concord between the different religions. Studying the way in which the European Court handles such cases will also lead us to new ideas on how to implement human rights in different religious cultures, while respecting diversity and religious freedom. In sum, exploring this human rights system will provide answers to the above posed questions, which shall lead us to new ideas on the tremendous important right to be protected in one’s religious freedom.