2023_07_26_The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights

Flagship journal of the New Left showcases the importance of Nahdlatul Ulama’s “Indo-Islamic rights tradition” to international peace and security

“The flourishing of a distinctive Indo-Islamic rights tradition in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation is of great significance to the global human rights community [for it demonstrates that] the concept of inalienable human rights enjoys broad if not universal resonance among the world’s great cultures and civilizations.”

~ C. Holland Taylor and Timothy S. Shah,
writing in Telos

NEW YORK, 26 July 2023 — The independent peer-reviewed journal Telos has released a special edition on “The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights” featuring contributions by numerous world class scholars. One of these essays, by Timothy Samuel Shah and C. Holland Taylor, examines the significance of emerging cooperation between the ancient “Indo-Islamic” rights tradition of Maritime Southeast Asia — which finds its modern expression in Humanitarian Islam — and Western traditions of constitutionalism, individual liberty, and Christian Democracy centered in Europe and the United States.

Founded in 1968 by Paul Piccone and other New Left graduates of SUNY-Buffalo, Telos was launched at a time of intense intellectual and cultural ferment in the West. It provided an intellectually rigorous outlet for the New Left, and introduced English-speaking readers to Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and related traditions while maintaining a distinctly leftist orientation. Known for its erudite, theoretically dense scholarship, Telos continues to publish high-level, critical articles on modernity, culture, and power.

This special edition of Telos emerged from a November 2021 conference held at the University of Notre Dame, titled “Inalienable Rights and the Traditions of Constitutionalism.” The conference was organized by prominent international human rights scholar Paolo Carozza and sponsored by Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

“The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights” special edition was edited by University of California, Irvine, Professor David Pan, who served on the U.S. Department of State’s Commission on Unalienable Rights (2019 – 2020). The Commission’s groundbreaking COUR Report inspired leaders of the world’s largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, and its young adults organization Gerakan Pemuda Ansor, to invite then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Indonesia. Secretary Pompeo’s historic visit helped inspire an essay titled “‘Three Rights Traditions Walk into a Bar in Jakarta’: Inalienable Human Rights from the Perspective of Different Civilizations.’”

Telos describes the essay — written by Center for Shared Civilizational Values co-founders C. Holland Taylor and Timothy Samuel Shah — as follows:

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of formal cooperation between three distinct “rights traditions” that are centered, respectively, in Europe, maritime Southeast Asia, and North America. The least known of these is also the most ancient. The Indo-Islamic rights tradition combines elements of Islam and Indonesia’s pre-Islamic Indian cultural and spiritual heritage. This tradition gave birth to Indonesia’s Constitution and its state philosophy of Pancasila. Significantly, contemporary heirs to this indigenous Indo-Islamic rights tradition have taken the initiative to establish formal lines of cooperation with key institutions and actors that embody the European and American rights traditions descended from Western humanism and Christianity — i.e., Christian democracy and the traditions of individual liberty, human equality and democracy grounded in the founding principles of the United States of America and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Leading proponents of the Indo-Islamic and Christian-democratic rights traditions are on record affirming the depth of the relationship that exists between their respective traditions. They also affirm the existence of a similar affinity with moral, spiritual, and political traditions originating in the United States, India, China, and elsewhere. The world’s largest Muslim organization, Indonesia’s 90-million-member Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), is moving systematically and institutionally to mobilize these diverse rights traditions, in order to preserve and strengthen a rules-based international order founded upon respect for the equal rights and dignity of every human being.

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