The main aim of my research is to contribute toward a history of the twentieth century viewed from the non-Western world. In my view, the principal failing of much current thought about the extra-European world is tendency to assume that political ideals and institutions which originated in the West are the common inheritance (or aspiration) of all peoples everywhere – and that the history of the post-war era can simply be told as the story of their inexorable globalization. My early work sought to problematize addressed one of the founding episodes in this world view – the process by which a world largely inhabited by a variety of empires was replaced, in barely a quarter of a century after 1945, with a world inhabited solely by secular nation-states. This uncovered the profound diversity of political ideas driving the mid-century struggles against empire, many of were not the product of a Western political genealogy, and it underlined the real diversity of empirical forms that make-up our current ‘international’ world, even beneath the common political rubric of the secular nation-state.
This project, “A history of the International Human Rights regime from the Arab-Islamic World” (UNIVERSALITY), continues this work by delving into the other great staple of many accounts about the making of the modern world – the birth of an international Human Rights regime. But how “universal” was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Reconstructing the story of the little-known “dissent” by Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser degree Yemen) in the vote on the General Assembly debate over the UDHR in December 1948, my research convey and tries to explain the real diversity of political thought that prevailed with regard to this ambitious post-war, universalist project. Focusing on especially important figures in the diplomatic discussions and international debates over the “universalism” of post-world institutions and ideals, UNIVERSALITY explored the experiences and ideational context of central figures such as Prince (later Crown Prince and King) Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud, who travelled extensively in the wartime and post-war United States, including to attend the San Francisco Conference to create the United Nations. Another important figure foregrounded in this research is the important nationalist-Islamic statesman from northern Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. Like Faisal, who became his close friend and confidante, Bello enunciated an autochthonous theory of independent statehood that challenged key aspects of international Human Rights discourse and the principles of the secular Western nation-state – even as he embraced colonial freedom and the emerging international political order.
In this respect, UNIVERSALITY advances critical new perspectives on how the shaping of post-war international institutions and frameworks could look from the Global South. At the same time, however, by tracing this “dissent” over time, UNIVERSALITY also uncovers processes of global convergence and integration around basic conceptions of rights and human dignity, rather than any fundamental clash of cultures, religions, or “civilizations”. So when a separate, supposedly rival “Islamic Human Rights” concept emerged in the 1970s, it looked a lot more like the UDHR than its early dissenters. This historical reconstruction and recovery therefore offers to academic and public audiences alike, as well as practitioners, new ways to understand how non-Western epistemologies helped form the modern international world.
