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Rumage: Resisting the West: The Clinton Administration's Promotion of Abo CALIFORNIA WESTERN INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL VOLUME 27 FALL 1996 NUMBER 1 RESISTING THE WEST: THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S PROMOTION OF ABORTION AT THE 1994 CAIRO CONFERENCE AND THE STRENGTH OF THE ISLAMIC RESPONSE SARAH A. RUMAGE" "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all."' "Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver, to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first spoke or wrote them. "2 INTRODUCTION Who makes the law, and who decides what the law means? For modem lawyers, the true riddle is not in the actors' identification, but whether these are different questions involving different actors, or instead the same question involving the same actors. For theologians, however, the question may even signify the dividing point between God and man. And until quite recently, * B.A., University of Miami (Florida) in anthropology, 1976; J.D., New York Law School, 1982; M.A. in history, 1993; LL.M. Temple University School of Law, 1996; Ph.D. candidate at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. I wish to thank Professor Fouad Ajami for his helpful comments and encouragement, Professor Imad-Ad-Dean Ahmad for his great patience and critical eye, Professor Robert Gurland for opening the world of philosophical ethics to me, and especially my students at Temple University School of Law, who never failed to make me think. 1. LEwiS CARROLL, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1871), reprinted in COMPLETE WORKS OF LEwIs CARROLL 196 (1936). 2. WILLIAM B. LOCKHART ET AL., CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, CASES, COMMENTS, QUESTIONS 1 (6th ed. 1986) (quoting Bishop Hoadly's sermon preached before the King, March 31, 1717). Published by CWSL Scholarly Commons, 1996 1 2 CaliforniaCALIFORNIA Western WESTERN International INTERNATIONAL Law Journal, Vol.LAW 27, JOURNAL No. 1 [1996], Art.[Vol. 2 27 in most of the world (regardless of culture), the jurist wrestling with the issue would have also been a theologian, or at least a moralist.3 In the seventeenth century Western world, law and God were not yet divorced, and although the marriage was not entirely happy, it was considered stable. Indeed, secular society's rise and revitalization in the West falls hard upon the jurist's own recent tumble from divine grace. The Eastern concept of law as the perfect expression of the will of God has been under siege for many centuries, and its defeat in modern Western eyes seemed certain and complete. The infamous crusades, a prolonged continental war of Christiani- ty, two world wars, and a bloody, stalemated Asian conflict point to an intercine Western struggle that necessarily held (as a pivotal precept) that victors made law as men, and divined law's meaning as well. The victors' unchallenged power to usurp God's authority and reap these and other spoils made the point obvious, and religion's role in defining law and its meaning was gradually diminished accordingly. In place of the religious empire or state arose a Godless leviathan that rules the West today, tolerant only of those faiths that eagerly accommodate themselves to the state's political authority, tolerant only of religion as an airy, ideological exercise, and physically manifested in forms as obscure (and yet inexplicably controversial) as a pledge of allegiance or a prayer to open parliament.' This view is inherently flawed. Religion has always been and continues to be, everywhere, more of a force than these pale acknowledgements. Although some in the United States propose that the legally-mandated practice of tolerance, democracy's lauded trademark, transcends its ordinary political value and rises to the level of a state religion, this is not the way of much of the world.' The Western world view that relegates religion solely 3. In western Europe, for example, scholars such as Hugo de Groot (better known as Grotius) and Gentilli are considered the fathers of modem-day international law. But in their own time, their fame rested largely on their work as moralistic theologians. Ironically, Thomas Moore, a famous and well- respected lawyer in his day, is now perceived mostly as a religious moralist (most famously for his fatal advice to Henry VIII regarding his ability to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Bolyn). Yet even in societies labeled as primitive or animistic, shamans and elders perform similar roles involving a blend of justice determination and interpretation of divine will. 4. In clarification, I do not mean to say that the United States is the "Godless leviathan," although it is the predominant Western power in the world today. The role of religion in U.S. society has always fluctuated and is often under siege, but remains very real to the citizens who practice their faiths. What I am referring to here is a more abstract zeitgeist that rejects the governing role of religion in citizens' daily life, relegating it to the hodge-podged realm of "privacy," where it keeps curious company with the issues of family, sex, birth control, and abortion-all of which are undeniably aspects of daily life. While such privacy "laws" protect the rights of Muslims to practice their faith in the West, the idea that Muslims would be ruled by shari'a in their daily lives is unacceptable to the United States and other secular powers. In this light, it is not so much that the United States is a "Godless" leviathan as it is a "lawless" one. Of course, to Muslims, there is no difference; where would one be left without God or His laws? Hence, the Ayatollah Khomeini's appellation of the United States as the "Great Satan" is an unflattering but not imperfect metaphor. Perhaps "Animal Farm" is a better appellation, more befitting the dictum of Seyyed Hossein Nasr that "[m]an is in absolute need of religion without which he is only accidentally human." SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR, IDEALS AND REALITIES OF ISLAM 24 (1967). 5. For the view that tolerance is the overriding moral value in the United States, see David A.J. Richards, Sexual Autonomy and the ConstitutionalRight to Privacy: A Case Study in Human Rights and the Unwritten Constitution, 30 HASTINGS L.J. 957 (1979) (address by David A.J. Richards at New York University School of Law's 1992 Jurisprudence Colloquium); David A.J. Richards, UnnaturalActs and the ConstitutionalRight to Privacy:A Moral Theory, 45 FORDHAM L. REV. 1281 (1977). One writer goes https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwilj/vol27/iss1/2 2 Rumage: Resisting the West: The Clinton Administration's Promotion of Abo 1996] ABORTION AND THE 1994 CAIRO CONFERENCE to the realm of the personal is a product of centuries of Western paganism (what Edward Luttwak calls "Enlightenment prejudice") 6-that harsh mixture of "classicism, impiety, and science" washed down with a heavy dose of the belief that "free will" equals intelligence and religious belief indicates stupidity and superstition.7 The West, incurably ethnocentric, ignores at its peril the revitalization of religion in the rest of the world. States inevitably last a long time, and civilizations even longer, but religion endures. Although all states have basic things in common (such as a defined area, population, and the capacity to engage in political relations with other states), the Islamic states are distinctive actors; they are both living fossils-curiosities of a time long past-and the shape of things to come, for they are religious states-more theocracies than democracies, despite the factor of popular elections-where the word of God has retained its vitality.' Within the borders of these states, Muslims may live their lives faithfully, as Islam embraces every aspect of their daily being. It is this aspect of Islam-its all-pervasiveness-that purportedly alarms the West. Yet even most secular states recognize religion in some way as a guiding force in the lives of all men.9 Religion is a force which secularism seeks to perpetually weaken, to bend to political compromise and accommo- dation. Judaism has been forced to make such compromises with ruling so far as to proclaim that the U.S. Constitution actually "forbids state action that has no purpose other than moral standard-setting." Peggy Cooper Davis, Changing Images of the State: Contested Images of Family Values: The Role of the State, 107 HARV. L. REV. 1348 (1994). Other scholars expand this claim to include international politics, and assert that democratic governments are the only legitimate forms of governance, and that a democracy cannot be a "true" democracy without declaring its obeisance to tolerance of all kinds of behavior. See, e.g., Gregory H. Fox & Georg Nolte, IntolerantDemocracies, 36 HARV. INT'L L.J. 1 (1995). But on a world-wide basis, this position is waning, even in the United States. In fact, groups that promote tolerance as the superior moral value feel more than threatened by the rise of religion and "family values" in the United States; they consider themselves under siege. See, e.g., DAVID CANTOR, THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT: THE ASSAULT ON TOLERANCE & PLURALISM IN AMERICA (1994). Cantor's work is a good example of the kind of ironies that arise among religious groups in the United States whose purpose is not religious at all, but political. Subsidized by the Jewish Anti- Defamation League (ADL), Cantor is critical of the U.S.

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