The Religion/Secularism Debate in Human Rights Literature: Constitutive Tensions between Christian, Islamic, and Secular Perspectives

The tension between religion and secularism within the field of human rights is a popular topic in contemporary international legal scholarship. In the first section of the chapter, I map the arguments between Christianity, Islam and liberal secular perspectives: on the one hand, exploring the different styles of treatment available within scholarship, and on the other hand, demonstrating how they bear a constitutive relationship to each other that reveals a common aesthetic sensibility and set of disciplinary assumptions among concerned scholars. Whatever differences exist in the texts, the paper seeks to show that authors only tend to produce four varieties of argument around the rhetorical trope law/religion/secularism, and that each of these four varieties are dependent upon their seemingly antagonistic counterparts.