Human rights, Islam and the failure of cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The rise of global human rights has been presented as compelling evidence for cosmopolitan progress, especially in Europe, with particular benefits for ethnic and religious minorities. New conceptions of citizenship – post-national, de-nationalized, disaggregated and cosmopolitan – have been used to show how minorities have created and profited from European cosmopolitanism. Some theorists have pointed to human rights activism, especially around the foulard affair, to illustrate the arrival of cosmopolitan justice. However, this paper suggests that cosmopolitan optimism has misjudged the magnitude of the impact of human rights. European cosmopolitanism’s commitment to ‘cool’ attachments has difficulty with ‘thick’ religious attachments. Muslim cosmopolitanism – expressed for example though religious pilgrimages – makes Muslims ‘bad’ cosmopolitans in the European version. This clash needs to be reconciled before Europe can define itself as the unrivalled source of cosmopolitan justice.