Human Rights: An-Na'im Wants to Term Paper

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But merely because such policies are codified in law means nothing -- unless individuals within the nation are willing to enforce such laws and unless institutions are created to support the administration of such human rights laws on a regular basis. Human rights must be enforced from the grass roots up, according to an-Na'im -- the rights are universal, but the administration is nationalistic and culturally specific.

Thus, dialogue must exist cross-culturally, and also within the different cultures of a nation, so that human rights can be enforced in feasible, comprehensible, and workable terms fort he local population. One must understand the culture of a nation before one deigns how human rights and political rights in general must be enforced. For women in many traditional countries, such as the Sudan, economic and social rights are linked to political and civil rights. The ability of women to act politically will most likely determine their success economically in the long run. In other nations, such as Saudi Arabia, some women may be economically powerful because of the wealth of their husbands or fathers, but this has yet to translate into political influence.

In other words, an-Na'im denies the relativistic notion that women simply have different ways of exercising their rights in traditional cultures, in the absence of being accorded social and political rights. But different countries still have different immediate legal and political needs of administration, and hence the need for cross-cultural dialogue and specificity between international human rights groups and nations, to decide the best way to realize the needs of a specific nation.

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Thus, an-Na'im is both more specific than the universal advancers of human rights dogma, as an-Na'im insists that addressing the particular needs of nations and communities is essential. Still, despite such differences, a respect for human dignity is both Islamic as well as Western, even though in both Muslim and Western nations women and other minority groups have been denied their human rights by individuals in different ways throughout the ages.

An-Na'im is not thus universalistic, not is he relativistic. A denial of rights is a denial of rights for in his view, regardless of the nation or cultural context -- if a woman is denied her right to vote, regardless of what the constitution of a nation says, because of local customs and pressures, this is fundamentally a wrong and a violation of her rights, whether it occurs in the American South or the Sudan. But an-Na'im also denies the universalizing tendency to suggest that all of 'us' should live under the thumb of one law and one form of governance. His basic argument is as follows: efforts to promote respect for international human rights standards are useless unless they are promoted through, local cultural, religious and other traditional communities -- in other words, unless ordinary peoples respect gender, ethnic, and religious differences of neighboring peoples and peoples within their community, strife will continue even in the presence of formal laws......

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