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Islam, Fiction and Human Rights: Amnesty International's Literature

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Islam, Fiction and Human Rights: Amnesty International's Literature Islam, Fiction and Human Rights: Amnesty International’s literature programme Loes van der Voort (3240525) 29-07-2013 Thesis Researchmaster Comparative Literary Studies, Universiteit Utrecht Supervisor: prof. dr. Ann Rigney 0 Table of Contents Introduction: Amnesty’s human rights literature programme ..............................................................2 1. The human in human rights discourse .......................................................................................5 2. The literary human: the singular universal ............................................................................. 17 3. Islam and modernity: deconstructing the myth of the clash of civilizations ........................ 32 4. Amnesty International and literature ..................................................................................... 45 Nomad: Enlightenment gone astray ............................................................................................. 48 The universal Arab woman at point zero ...................................................................................... 57 Incorporating the impossible: female suicide terrorism in Before We Say Goodbye ................... 64 The difficulty of becoming other people: Nothing To Lose But My Life ........................................ 75 The silent voices of Guantánamo .................................................................................................. 84 Islam’s human-shaped spin-off: Sufism ........................................................................................ 94 Conclusion: soft law, soft weapons and the soft power of humanity ................................................ 99 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 104 1 Introduction: Amnesty’s human rights literature programme And what has art and literature to do with human rights? They are all bound up with this wonderful talent we humans have: to empathise with others. If, by reading… we are enabled to step, for one moment, into another person’s shoes, to get right under their skin, then that is already a great achievement. Through empathy we overcome prejudice, develop tolerance and ultimately understand love. Stories can bring understanding, healing, reconciliation and unity. – Archbishop Desmond Tutu1 These words appear on Amnesty International’s website and introduce the page entitled “Human rights fiction and poetry”. The page can be found under the general heading “take action,” and it lists a number of novels and poetry collections that are (co-)published, recommended or endorsed by Amnesty. The page offers a range of books through the Amnesty web shop and provides links to Amazon.com for the purchase of the remaining works. Related Amnesty webpages recommend more human rights fiction and non-fiction,2 as well as a pamphlet that encourages teachers to use the works as a resource to incorporate a “personalised” version of otherwise abstract human rights into the classroom. The pamphlet supports the Desmond Tutu quote in asserting that literature helps people to empathize, which means that it “makes it easier to be kind, tolerant and willing to consider other points of view. It makes it harder to adopt prejudiced stances, helps to guard against aggression and conflict and may even encourage people to take positive action on behalf of others.”3 The connection between literature and human rights is no spontaneous invention to be ascribed to Amnesty International. Literature has been tied historically to the emergence and perpetuation of human rights discourse.4 The world of letters has historically allowed people to imagine other lives and connect their individuality to those of others. This, among other factors, resulted in the emergence of the public sphere, which consequently became a space where the people could publicly influence politics and law.5 This coincided with the Enlightenment separation of natural and legal rights and social contract theory, on which I will elaborate later. Although these developments are more connected to the emerging nation-state than to a universal community, as many scholars have argued, they do acknowledge the role of literature in creating communities. Novels, and the empathy they engaged, also had a more universal role to play in the development of the first human rights documents that finally lead to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).6 Joseph Slaughter, in his Human Rights Inc., examines at the intersection of legal scholarship and comparative literature the relation between literature and human rights. He connects the discourse of the UDHR to that of the Bildungsroman, arguing that both discourses revolve around the socialization of the individual. As becomes clear in both Slaughter’s theory and other theories that deal with human rights, the idea of universal human rights ties in with a notion of a global community that binds 1 Amnesty International, Human Rights Fiction and Poetry. April 4th 2013. http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=11728. April 4th 2013. 2 Top Ten Summer Books List for Human Rights Advocates. April 2nd 2012. http://blog.amnestyusa.org/africa/top-10-summer-reading-list-for-human-rights-advocates/. April 2nd 2013. 3Amnesty International, Using Fiction to Teach Human Rights. August 21st 2012. http://www.amnesty.org.uk/uploads/documents/doc_22658.pdf. April 2nd 2013. 4 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008; Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Thomas Burger trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1991. 6 Hunt. 2 humans together. Imagined collectivity7 or a common humanity that can be recognized in singular people and their stories, many have argued, destabilizes and broadens frameworks of understanding otherness.8 In this view, a story invites the reader to imagine the other and opens one up to particularities and alternative views of the self and the other, while allowing for the recognition of common grounds. As such, the relation between stories and the recognition of people’s human rights has been acknowledged widely.9 Amnesty’s vision uses this connection to insist on the power of literature in achieving human rights’ universal aspirations. However, if there is a common ground to humanity, there must be a norm that allows these singular beings to be defined as human. If there is no norm, no definition to determine what it means to be human, what holds humanity together? As Slaughter has argued, ‘the People’ are constituted in contrast to those who do not count as ‘the People’,10 and subsequently have no rights; normativity also excludes. At the same time, Slaughter recognizes the importance of norms if human rights law wants to be effective. As such, any discussion about human rights is also about who falls outside the boundaries of humanity.11 The literary works endorsed by Amnesty cover a wide range of topics concerning human rights abuse, a large number of which are related to Islamic societies. Amnesty, although aspiring (and acquiring) international reach, is a European-born non-governmental organisation; its agenda originates in the equally European-born UDHR. In an increasingly globalized world, the contact with societies that are based on different sets of values poses problems. Since 9/11, increasing Islamophobia, anti-Americanism and the idea that Islam cannot be reconciled with the Western values on which international human rights law is based has even more complicated mutual understanding.12 But, Amnesty’s website suggests, the universality of empathy could overcome our perceived differences. It insists that literature not only creates empathy, but tolerance, understanding and even positive action. As such, literature can support the quest for the ultimate universality of human rights that the UDHR is assuming as well as aiming for. I want to investigate the balance between universality and singularity that Amnesty International’s choice of Islam-related literature portrays. Because of the perceived fundamental differences between Islam and Western values, my choice for these works serves to illustrate how Amnesty negotiates differences in favour of the idea of common humanity. Can a commonality be found that allows humans, those addressed by the UDHR, to regard others, those yet to be included, as equally 7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 8 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 33; Slaughter, 2007; Spivak. 9 Paul Gready, “Novel Truths: Literature and Truth Commissions”. Comparative Literature Studies 46.1 (2009); Marcos Piason Natali, “Beyond the Right to Literature”. Comparative Literature Studies 46.1 (2009). 10 Slaughter 2007; 157. 11 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004; Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. 12 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin Books, 2006, 138-150; Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 19; Butler 2004, 2; John J. Donohue & John L. Esposito, Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives.
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