On this anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we offer a reflection rather than a demand — though the times would justify demands.
The Declaration’s drafters wrote in the ruins of a war that had made human dignity seem like sentimentality. They wagered otherwise. Muslims can recognize the wager: our tradition had staked itself, thirteen centuries earlier, on the claim that the children of Adam are honored — all of them, prior to any faith, nation, or usefulness. The overlap is not an accident to be explained away but a mercy to be worked with.
We reflect, too, on the distance between signature and practice — a distance every state and, if we are honest, every community knows intimately. The Qur’an asks believers to stand firm in justice though it be against yourselves. That clause, “against yourselves,” is the whole difficulty of human rights, and the whole point.
May the coming year find the Declaration less quoted and more kept — beginning with those of us who quote it.