Identity and Human Rights in the Muslim World:Negotiating Norms in the Age of Globalization

Flaws in overly optimistic theories of globalization demonstrate that aside from its pure economic implications, globalization has generated profound social disruption and cultural resistance. The critics of globalization, who see it as a juggernaut of untrammeled capitalism, fear a world ruled by profit-seeking multinational and global corporations. They also question the imposition of cultural standards of one region of world, namely the West, on all other regions. No issue is more acute in the global debate than the issue of devaluation of local identities. Moreover, the same ethical questions that confront the human rights regime also confront the globalizationprocess. Whom does the process of globalization serve And who should shape its development Some Western scholars, such as Richard Falk, have noted that universalism has been used as a cover to obscure Western hegemony and that any genuine and universal attempt at constructing human rights must be based not on uniformity but rather on the coexistence of different cultures.1 The codex of Enlightenment values must be re-examined in both context of time and space. Others, such as Michael Ignatieff, argue that the moral consensus, which sustained the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, has increasingly splintered and that there is noevidence that economic globalization entails moral globalization.