Review of “Muslims and the Western Conception of Rights”: Human Rights Beyond the Ideals

It has been 1,415 years since the end of the Jāhiliyya — a concept often referenced by Muslim thinkers as a pivotal turning point in human history. This moment was expected to usher in an era of justice. But has it? The promise of that age — justice, dignity, and knowledge — remains an unfinished project. It is a goal toward which many, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, continue to strive. The end of Jāhiliyya was not merely a historical event; it marked the beginning of an enduring challenge — to continually struggle for a more just world. As contemporary Muslim scholars like Abdulaziz Sachedina argue, the Prophet Muhammad’s message represented more than a religious break with Arabia’s pagan past. It was a profound moral and civilizational transformation. For Sachedina, the Qur’an introduced a new ethical consciousness centered on human dignity, justice, and moral agency — values that strongly resonate with modern human rights principles.

Sachedina contends that the Qur’an is not limited to theological or metaphysical concerns; it speaks directly to the conditions of human life. It addresses the disenfranchised and the oppressed, offering not only spiritual guidance but also a moral vision for society. The Qur’anic declaration that God has honored all the children of Adam (Qur’an 17:70), in Sachedina’s interpretation, affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every human being — regardless of religion, ethnicity, or gender. Thus, the Islamic break from Jāhiliyya marked not only the embrace of monotheism but also a radical ethical reordering of human relationships.

Central to this transformation is the Qur’anic view of the human being as a moral agent — accountable not through blind obedience, but through reason, conscience, and ethical action. For Sachedina, this anticipates a democratic ethos: the belief that people are capable of self-rule, that authority must be accountable, and that no human being has the right to dominate another unjustly. In contrast to the hierarchical and often arbitrary power structures of the Jāhiliyya era, the Qur’an presented justice as a divine imperative.

Despite this ethical foundation, Sachedina acknowledges that over time, the moral vitality of the Qur’anic message was constrained by the emergence of rigid legal schools and political authoritarianism. Classical jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh), while offering valuable insights, often evolved in contexts where preserving power took precedence over promoting justice. In areas such as women’s rights, religious freedom, and political dissent, Islamic law as historically practiced frequently fell short of the Qur’an’s moral ideals.

To address this divergence, Sachedina advocates not a return to Islamic law alone, but to Islamic ethics. He calls for a renewal of the Muslim intellectual tradition rooted in ijtihād — independent, reasoned interpretation — and oriented toward contemporary challenges such as human rights, democracy, and pluralism. Importantly, he argues that Islam does not need to borrow from Western thought to achieve this; the resources for a robust human rights framework already exist within the Islamic tradition — if they are ethically reengaged.

For Sachedina, then, the journey that began with the end of Jāhiliyya is far from complete. It is a continuing struggle — a call to Muslims and all people of conscience to fulfill the highest ideals of their tradition. When understood through its moral foundations, Islam is not only compatible with human rights; it is a powerful advocate for them.

This perspective links human rights norms to civilizational, cultural, and political traditions — through reason. Islam’s emphasis on reason allows societies to localize universal values like human dignity and agency. Yet this Islamic engagement with rights is largely absent from dominant human rights discourse, which traces its lineage instead to another rupture: the Enlightenment, which marked the end of Europe’s so-called Dark Ages. While Islamic thought sought harmony between reason and belief, Enlightenment thought embraced a secularism that separated the two, asserting that reason and religion were incompatible.

The Enlightenment — now roughly 300–400 years old and known as the Age of Reason — was expected to bring about human rights, liberty, and prosperity. But has it? A modern thinker who reflects on this question is William Talbott, a scholar steeped in Enlightenment ideals but aware of their limitations. Like Sachedina within the Islamic tradition, Talbott seeks to reconcile Enlightenment values with a more inclusive vision of human rights. Talbott argues that the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for a process of moral discovery. Philosophers like John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced revolutionary ideas that challenged arbitrary authority and affirmed human equality. They promoted reason as the foundation for moral principles — not tradition, divine command, or hierarchical structures. For Talbott, this emphasis on reason and universal moral concern was foundational to the modern human rights movement.

Notwithstanding its pivotal contribution to human rights, Talbott is clear-eyed about the Enlightenment’s contradictions. Despite its ideals, the period was rife with paternalistic abuses. Many Enlightenment thinkers, while advocating reason as the path to freedom, maintained condescending attitudes toward women, enslaved peoples, and indigenous populations. These groups were often excluded from the very rights the Enlightenment claimed to uphold, deemed incapable of rational or moral autonomy. This paternalism, according to Talbott, justified historical injustices such as slavery, colonialism, and gender inequality. These were driven by the belief that certain groups lacked the capacity for reason and therefore required paternal oversight. Talbott sees this assumption as deeply flawed — and still influential today. However, he believes such errors can be corrected through bottom-up processes of moral reasoning and public dialogue. Moral development, he argues, does not come through imposition but through inquiry and self-reflection within societies. As societies engage in rational deliberation, they can expand the circle of moral concern to include those previously marginalized. Talbott’s epistemological approach — grounded in the belief that objective moral truths can be discovered through rational discourse — rejects cultural relativism. He asserts that while different cultures may take different paths, reason leads to the same universal principles of justice for all. The historical progress of human rights — from the abolition of slavery to the advancement of women’s and minority rights — is, for Talbott, a testament to this evolving moral consciousness. For Talbott, as for Sachedina, the path to universal human rights lies in sustained moral reflection and the ongoing pursuit of justice — one rooted in our shared human capacity for reason.

William Talbott and Abdulaziz Sachedina represent two influential approaches to human rights theory that, while rooted in different intellectual traditions, both ground human rights in frameworks of moral reasoning. Talbott, working within the liberal philosophical tradition, argues that human rights emerge from humanity’s gradual moral progress. Through reasoned deliberation and historical learning, societies come to “discover” human rights—realizing over time that certain principles are essential to protect human dignity and ensure justice.

In contrast, Sachedina grounds human rights in Islamic ethics. He argues that, properly interpreted—through reason, the Qur’an affirms the core principles of human dignity, equality, and accountability—values shared with modern human rights norms. For Sachedina, religious traditions are not obstacles to universality but can serve as culturally rooted foundations for human rights. Despite differing sources of legitimacy—philosophical reason for Talbott and Islamic ethics for Sachedina—both thinkers assume that human rights depend on a recognition of moral truths or alignment with evolving cultural norms. For both thinkers, human rights are discoverable truths through reason.

In Muslims and the Western Conception of Rights (2023), Ahmed Souaiaia offers a forceful critique of this optimistic view. Rather than seeing human rights abuses as diminishing with moral or intellectual progress, Souaiaia contends they are persistent, systemic, and inevitable across all forms of governance. From empires to modern democracies, from autocracies to revolutionary movements, abuses occur—often on a massive scale and frequently perpetrated by actors who publicly endorse the very ideals they violate. His critique challenges both Sachedina’s belief in Islam’s ethical norms alone to promote justice in practice and Talbott’s confidence in the Enlightenment’s legacy to foster moral advancement. Souaiaia argues that these models are overly reductionist and fail to account for the complex, contradictory realities of modern political life. He rejects the notion that human rights abuses are simply remnants of a less enlightened past, asserting instead that they are embedded in the structures of society and driven by underlying motivations—not merely failures of reason or ethics.

One of Souaiaia’s most incisive contributions to this discourse on rights is his distinction between justification and motivation—a conceptual move that disrupts both Enlightenment and Islamic moral narratives. He critiques Talbott’s view that atrocities like colonialism and slavery were driven by paternalism—a misguided but sincere belief in empire’s civilizing mission. For Souaiaia, paternalism was not the cause but a justification: a rhetorical device used to mask true motivations and ease the conscience of perpetrators. The real drivers, he argues, are rooted in a plurality of systems, natural and social, expressed in the form of biological, psychological, and social energies—greed, fear, racism, supremacism, self-interest, and the pursuit of dominance. These motivations are generally unspoken and irrational but deeply ingrained. They are the true engine of human actions. They form a hidden architecture of power that shapes behavior across time and space. Justifications—whether in the form of civilizing missions, national security, or ethical or religious duty—serve merely to render morally acceptable what is otherwise unconscionable.

Another key contribution from Souaiaia is his insistence on systems thinking as essential to any meaningful understanding of human rights. This framework does not isolate moral reasoning or political ideals but instead considers a wide array of interconnected systems—social, political, economic, cultural, biological, environmental, and conceptual. These systems dynamically co-evolve. adapt, and influence each other over time.

In Souaiaia’s view, institutions—from governments to markets to militaries—are energized not by ideology or ethics alone but importantly by underlying motivational forces. Economic systems may be driven by greed or competition, political systems by fear or control, and cultural systems by in-group loyalty or exclusion. These forces drive decisions, shape policies, and normalize harm—even when such actions are cloaked in the language of human rights, democracy, or humanitarianism.

Souaiaia’s systems approach thus reframes human rights violations not as anomalies or correctable moral lapses but as products of complex, interconnected dynamics. These violations persist because they are outcomes of deep-seated motivations embedded in human biology, social structures, and conceptual frameworks. By mapping these interdependencies and understanding how power and energy flow across systems we can begin to meaningfully address the persistence of abuse.

Through this framework, Souaiaia critiques Sachedina’s ethical idealism and Talbott’s rational progressivism as insufficient. Both underestimate the structural and motivational complexities of the world in which human rights are invoked, contested, and violated. They assume that moral clarity or epistemological refinement can guide societies toward justice. Souaiaia rejects this notion, arguing that moral reasoning alone cannot dismantle entrenched systems of oppression. Instead, he calls for systemic diagnostics: a mode of analysis that recognizes how diverse, often hidden, and morally ambiguous systems interact to shape outcomes. The systems thinking framework, he suggests, allows us not only to identify the true drivers of abuse but also to design interventions that reduce harm, realign incentives, and potentially deactivate the forces that sustain oppression. By distinguishing between justification and motivation and emphasizing the interconnections among natural, social,  conceptual, and the myriad of other systems, Souaiaia offers a more complex, but realistic, and ultimately more actionable framework for understanding and responding to human rights abuses.

What distinguishes Souaiaia’s work is not merely that he “thinks in terms of systems,” but that he develops and applies universal principles of systems thinking to human rights discourse in both explanatory and normative ways. His approach does not depend on moral consensus, cultural development, or epistemic enlightenment. Rather, it is grounded in the observable and testable mechanics of how governance structures operate—and fail. Souaiaia contends that the universality of human rights violations does not reflect lack of moral clarity and ignorance. Instead, it stems from a fundamental reality: all organized human societies create systems of governance, and all such systems inherently consolidate power around dominant social groups and dominant values and interests. Whether this dominance is based on religion, ethnicity, class, or ideology, the structural outcome is the same: some groups define the rules, while others are subject to them. In these systems, human rights violations are not aberrations but structural byproducts of governance itself.

When comparing the ideas of Abdulaziz Sachedina and William Talbott, one finds a shared recognition of contradictions in how powerholders behave in both Islamic and Western contexts. More troubling, however, is their moral optimism—the belief that humanity is steadily progressing toward a more just, rights-respecting world. This view fails to fully engage with the persistent, systemic, and often worsening reality of human rights abuses across history and into the present.

Sachedina rightly highlights the ethical teachings of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the historical application of these ideals quickly faltered. The Prophet’s close companion and successor, Caliph `Uthman, was assassinated by rebels who accused him of violating Quranic principles of justice and equity. Since the Prophet’s death, over 111 caliphs and sultans have ruled; even sympathetic Muslim historians acknowledge that only a handful—perhaps five—could be reasonably described as righteous. This legacy exposes a deep rift between ethical teachings and political realities—a gap that Sachedina largely overlooks in his hopeful vision of Islamic ethical evolution.

Similarly, Talbott’s narrative about the Enlightenment as a driver of universal human rights fails to account for the violent contradictions that accompanied this so-called progress. While Western thinkers were drafting declarations of liberty and natural rights, their governments were committing egregious violations: the near-annihilation of Indigenous peoples, the colonization of vast territories, and the construction of exploitative systems that enriched colonizers while dispossessing native populations of land, resources, and autonomy.

Even the atrocities of the 20th century did not lead to the moral awakening Talbott envisions. Despite the devastation of two world wars—including the deaths of over 70 million people and the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the postwar commitment to human dignity, exemplified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, coincided not with the end of abuse, but with its transformation. The global economic and military structures that emerged continued to exploit and marginalize vulnerable populations—only now through more institutionalized and opaque means. War, displacement, economic inequality, and environmental degradation accelerated, often under the guise of progress and development.

In this context, Souaiaia contends that the language of rights has often served as a moral façade for ongoing violence and control. Both Talbott and Sachedina, in charting a trajectory of moral improvement, fail to confront the historical and contemporary evidence that suggests regression rather than progress. Their frameworks, though well-intentioned, remain disconnected from the lived realities of most of the world’s population. Souaiaia concludes that what we are witnessing today is not the flourishing of human rights but their steady erosion—concealed by rhetorical affirmations and legal declarations that rarely translate into justice. The problem is not the ideals themselves, but the philosophical failure to confront the enduring structures that continually betray them.

From Souaiaia’s perspective, human rights violations are best understood as state crimes—either by commission, through policies, laws, or violence, or by omission, through the failure to restrain powerful institutions or actors. What makes Souaiaia’s reframing of rights crucial is his refusal to attribute these failures to a lack of moral development. Nor does he suggest that better knowledge or more enlightened values will prevent abuse. History is replete with atrocities committed not in ignorance but with full ideological and moral justification. Slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide were often carried out by regimes convinced of their own righteousness, invoking divine will, civilizational duty, or the supposed benefits of domination—sometimes with intellectual sophistication.

History, Souaiaia reminds us, is not a perfect, but it is a reliable body of evidence. And history tells us that the moral and theological justifications for human rights—such as those proposed by Talbott and Sachedina—are not only inadequate but potentially misleading. They imply that progress depends on better ideas, broader consensus, or more inclusive moral visions. Souaiaia argues instead that what is needed are better systems: systems designed not around idealized virtues but around principles that anticipate, constrain, and correct the abuse of power.

Here, Souaiaia’s use of the systems thinking framework becomes transformative. He doesn’t just borrow the language of systems to describe complex social dynamics; he develops universal, applicable principles from systems theory to reframe human rights as structured responses to specific, predictable structural failures. These principles are not theoretical abstractions—they can be applied, tested, and refined. By shifting the conversation from moral aspiration to structural design, Souaiaia offers a framework for evaluating policy outcomes, institutional behavior, and power distribution in terms of their potential to reproduce or mitigate harm.

Souaiaia’s approach is compelling not because it imposes a single moral code, but because it identifies a universal condition: the concentration and exercise of power in human societies. The need for human rights arises not from shared moral awakening, but from shared structural vulnerability. His framework accommodates cultural and religious diversity without collapsing into relativism, because it focuses on patterns of harm, not moral agreement. In doing so, Souaiaia shifts the human rights discourse from discovery or reconciliation to engineering and accountability.

Souaiaia does not promise a world without human rights violations—such a vision would ignore the deeply embedded nature of governance and power. But he offers a realistic path forward: systems that recognize their own capacity for harm, incorporate mechanisms for redress, and remain open to recalibration based on empirical outcomes. His approach transforms human rights from ideals to be affirmed into a practical toolkit for intervention and reform, grounded in systems logic and responsive to lived realities.

While Talbott and Sachedina ask how we come to know what is right, Souaiaia asks what kinds of systems produce harm—and how they can be restructured. In doing so, he redefines the very purpose of human rights: not as moral trophies of civilization, but as dynamic instruments for managing the inherent risks of governance itself.

Review of: Muslims and the Western Conception of Rights; by Ahmed E Souaiaia | Paperback | English, Routledge, January 9, 2023 | ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0367776176 | 204 pages.