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

The rise in the twentieth century of Islamism and other movements of politicized religion has raised both practical and theoretical concerns for those espousing the inevitable universalization of modern, secular human rights values. This essay addresses one facet of this complex issue through an examination of two very different twentieth-century critics of modernity: the early postmodern Walter Benjamin and the early Islamist Sayyid Qutb. Each of these critics articulates a particular “religious-minded” anxiety regarding the secular ethico-political underpinnings of many modern systems of governance; in doing so, they reveal a number of philosophical and practical limitations to the international human rights language of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such limitations, in turn, help elucidate one of today's most publicized and misunderstood developments within modern Islamism: the systematization and the popularization of an aggressive yet avowedly “humanitarian” philosophy of religio-political violence.