Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im and Ebrahim Moosa (South Africa) who dedicated scholarship and activism on Islamic reformation, have acknowledged the difficulties or tensions in the interface of Islam to the existing human rights regime.

One of the problematic areas relate to the internal transformation argument: that Islamic reformation requires a cultural legitimacy among Muslims.

For An-Na'im the dichotomy of the human rights discourse between relativism and universalism is not a useful approach in relation to Islam.

"At one end of this purported spectrum are said countries which claim cultural/religious relativity or contextual specificity to justify rejecting or qualifying certain universal human rights norms, in contrast to those which are supposed to fully accept the universality of all human rights, at the other end," he says.

"Whereas some Islamic and East Asian countries are commonly placed on the relativist side, Western countries are commonly assumed to be universalist."