![]() The fact that it constitutes a minimal consensus, rather than an extreme view, makes it all the more illuminating. The Cairo Declaration is not binding under international law, but it illuminates the global attitude of Islam with respect to fundamental rights. It was intended as an appendix to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On August 5, 1990, 45 foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the highest international secular body in the Muslim world, signed "The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam." In that document, Muslims from around the world expressed their common attitudes towards human rights. In those areas, Muslims are very united indeed. Let us look at the question of human rights and women' s rights, for example. Despite all differences of detail, in its writings and its philosophy it constitutes a cohesive view of mankind and the world. With that brief assertion, Mr Buruma attempts to reduce the West's confrontation with Islam to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's personal problem. That is a rather astonishing statement from a man who is an academic at Bard College in New York, and a professor of democracy and human rights. He maintains that one cannot make generalised statements about Islam, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does. For Buruma, however, the details justify criticism that is as devastating as it is false. The first is: "Islam is diverse." Buruma writes, "Islam, as practised in Java, is not the same as in a Moroccan village, or the Sudan, or Rotterdam." That may be true in the details, but not in the fundamentals. But both Ash and Buruma are quite typical in their argumentation, and virtually exemplary in their politically dubious cultural relativism.īoth make ample use of stereotypes. ![]() If Mr Buruma were alone in his views, one might have left things as they were and simply referred the reader to Bruckner's essay, a response to Timothy Garton Ash. Reading his response to Pascal Bruckner's essay "Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?" one is tempted to say to Ian Buruma, "If only you had kept quiet!" He clearly felt himself caught out, and despite his insistence to the contrary, his reply only leads him further into the swamp of cultural relativism.
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