Radical Islam and Human Rights Values: A “Religious-Minded” Critique of Secular Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood

摘要

The rise in the twentieth century of Islamism and other movements ofnpoliticized religion has raised both practical and theoretical concernsnfor those espousing the inevitable universalization of modern, secularnhuman rights values. This essay addresses one facet of this complexnissue through an examination of two very different twentieth-centuryncritics of modernity: the early postmodern Walter Benjamin and thenearly Islamist Sayyid Qutb. Each of these critics articulates a particularn“religious-minded” anxiety regarding the secular ethico-political under-npinnings of many modern systems of governance; in doing so, theynreveal a number of philosophical and practical limitations to the inter-nnational human rights language of the twentieth and early twenty-firstncenturies. Such limitations, in turn, help elucidate one of today’s mostnpublicized and misunderstood developments within modern Islamism:nthe systematization and the popularization of an aggressive yet avow-nedly “humanitarian” philosophy of religio-political violence.