Dispute it as they may, the ability of PAS, for example, to proceed with its religious-Islamism project - be it the creation of an Islamic state, hudud law or the road-show of the 'proper Muslim attire' for Muslim women - is due to secularism and human rights.

Secularism and human rights have also fostered support and dissent over the Islamic state issue, hudud law, rehabilitation laws, insult to Islam laws, religious freedom and other matters related to the plurality of religious beliefs and practices of Malaysians.

Islamist groups have increasingly utilised the rhetoric of human rights to further their particular agendas.

It is heartening to see PAS for example, resorting to human rights claims, more so after the sacking of former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim in September 1998, and to periodic arrests under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

Unhappily, there are some Islamist groups which gladly champion human rights, and yet deny to others the right of challenge to their own particular views or interpretations.

This perhaps reflects a lack of appreciation of the marketplace of ideas which includes in this example, the marketplace of religious ideas. These groups appear to resent the participation in the marketplace of religious ideas that democracy assumes.

There is resentment of the pluralism of religious ideas with its attendant religious free speech that democracy encourages and protects.

The problem is that the genie, once out, cannot be forced back into the bottle.

There is also another problem which most religion-based groups including political parties have not quite acknowledged.

This has to do with the difficulty of the Muslim tradition to come to terms with key modern ideas of pluralism, democracy and the market economy. These are also ideas of a secularised world.

Secularisation theory

The "secularisation theory" referred in works from the 1950s and 1960s is that modernisation leads to a decline in religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals.

Peter L. Berger, one of many sociologists who had contributed to this body of literature in the past, now says that the assumption is false.

"To be sure, modernisation has had some secularising effects, more in some places than in others. But it has provoked powerful movements of counter-secularisation. Also, secularisation on the societal level is not necessarily linked to secularisation on the level of individual consciousness.

"Certain religious institutions have lost power and influence in many societies, but both old and new religious beliefs and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of individuals, sometimes taking new institutional forms and sometimes leading to explosions of religious fervour."

Berger does not think however, that a religious revolution (rejecting modern ideas and values) can be a successful enterprise, citing Franco Spain and Iran.

The failure of religious revolution, according to Berger, does have to do with modernisation which brings about very heterogeneous societies and a quantum leap in inter-cultural communication. These two factors favour pluralism and not the establishment or re-establishment of religious monopolies.

Getting people to reject modern ideas and values through the creation of religious sub-cultures may be more promising (than a revolution) but still fraught with difficulty as modern culture is a very powerful force.

Berger says, immense effort is required to maintain enclaves in these sub-cultures. He cites the Amish community in Eastern Pennsylvania. Closer to home, we had the Darul Arqam community, before the government broke it up by hauling in its leaders under the ISA.

Berger opines that human rights and social justice in relation to religion is more complex. What is justice to some is gross injustice to others. He has a caveat nevertheless: Those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.

Religion and human rights

John Witte, the director of the law and religion programme of the University of Emory Law School, acknowledges the awakening of religion around the globe with the human rights revolution.

However, this same world human rights revolution has also helped catalyse new forms of religious and ethnic conflict, oppression and belligerence.

Rival religious communities began to demonise and defame each other and to gather themselves into ever more dogmatic and fundamentalist stands.

The awakening of religion in part, supports a "legal war" where religion-based groups began to conspire with political leaders to adopt statutes and regulations restricting constitutional rights-antiproselytism laws, registration requirements and other discriminatory restrictions.

There is a paradox. The awakening of religion has also inspired the search to deter violence, resolve disputes, cultivate peace and ensure security through dialogue, liturgical healing, reconciliation ceremonies, truth commissions and other means.

It would seem that human rights principles are as much as the problem as they are the solution.

Witte proposes that religion and human rights need to be brought into a closer symbiosis. Human rights norms need religious narratives to ground them. Conversely, religious narratives need human rights norms both to protect them and to challenge them.

Human rights hermeneutics

Religious sceptics argue that human rights challenge the structure of religious bodies. While human rights norms teach liberty and equality, religious bodies teach authority and hierarchy. Speech and action is countermanded by duties of silence and submission.

Witte is of the view that these skeptical arguments are premised on the idea that human rights norms are static. That is not the case.

The human rights regime is fluid, elastic and open to challenge and change. It is a relative system of ideas and ideals that pre-supposes the existence of fundamental beliefs and values that will constantly shape and reshape it.

Thus competing theological views of the divine and the human, of good and evil, of individuality and community will inform and reform, will develop and deepen the human rights ideals now in place.

Witte and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (Sudan) are among the scholars of religion and human rights, who are talking about a human rights hermeneutics.

In this engagement with human rights, religion-based groups have returned to their traditional roots and routes of nurturing and challenging the human rights regime.

Witte says Christian churches have acknowledged their departure from the cardinal teachings of peace and love that are in the sacred texts and traditions. The Second Vatican Council for example, confessed to complicity in authoritarianism in the support for apartheid, communism, racism, sexism, fascism and anti-Semitism.

The return to the religious sources is in part a return to the sacred texts "freed from the casuistic accretions of generations of jurists and freed from the cultural trappings of the communities in which these traditions were born....The return among others, requires an investigation of the voices of dissent which may have been purged from traditional religious canons which might be relevant today."

Internal transformation

An-Na'im, who is director of the Islam and Human Rights project in Emory, points to the empirical fact that interpretation is the means of understanding the purpose and normative implications of the Quranic text.

Ali bin Abi Talib, the fourth caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet is reported to have said, "The Quran does not speak, it is people who speak on its behalf."

Islam like any other religion has its own framework of interpretation: a set of interpretive rules, techniques and underlying assumptions which are accepted by Muslims as valid or authoritative.

This understanding could lead to all participants in the hermeneutical process claiming that their interpretation is the correct one according to a particular framework.

Others challenge the authority of a given framework and seek an alternative. This has given rise to differences of opinion among scholars. This pluralism is acceptable in Muslim scholarship.

Over time, there is a tendency to appropriate and monopolise the process of interpretation for the exclusive few. An-Na'im proposes that the community of Muslims reclaim the process of revivalism and reformation and break the monopoly of the clergy or technocrats of hermeneutics.

The exclusivity of interpreters was not known in the relevant period in Muslim history when scholars were actively involved in interpreting the text of the Quran. Scholars merely expound an opinion and Muslims are free to accept or reject these.

An-Na'im suggests that the sociological, political, economic circumstances at the time when the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) was allegedly closed at the end of the third century of Islam, was "not ripe for a change in the orientation of Muslims which would have permitted acceptance of proposed reforms".

He emphasised that, that historical contingency can only be accurately judged in retrospect.

He is open to the idea that a rejection of a hermeneutical argument for reform at any point in time should not be seen as final and conclusive, or that its historical contingency will never be satisfied in the future.

Subsequent generations of reformers may continue to make, refine and update the argument in their own context, time and place.

The Quran supports this approach. The text makes references to humankind or the children of Adam without the intermediacy of clergy or state officials (or political parties). In so doing, the Quran constantly emphasises that people should reflect and consider what is being said.

Surah 2:12 and 3:43 declare human reflection and understanding to be the whole purpose of revealing the Quran.

Part 2 will be posted tomorrow

SALBIAH AHMAD referred to the following sources:

Peter L. Berger 'The Desecularisation of the World: A Global View', in Peter L. Berger (ed), 'The Desecularisation of the World-Resurgent Religion and World Politics'. Washington DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center. 1999

John Witte, 'A Dickension Era of Human Rights: An Update on Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective'. [2001] William and Mary Law Review. Vol 42 No. 3, 707

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966 and the optional protocols to these are known as the "International Bill of Rights". These are often referred to as the documents bringing forth the human rights revolution or the human rights regime.

See John Witte et al, (eds) 'Religious Human Rights in Global Perspectives' Vol. II. Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers . 1996.

Abdullahi A An-Na'im, 'Toward an Islamic Hermeneutics for Human Rights' in Abdullahi A. An-Na'im et.al (eds), 'Human Rights and Religious Values: An Uneasy Relationship?' Grand Rapids Mich: W. B. Eerdmans. 1994