The editors in this volume argue that the relevance or irrelevance of human rights to the Arab world is determined by a shifting political and socioeconomic context—one not preordained by a supposedly unchanging cultural context. The chapters in the book are divided into four interrelated sections. The book's first section puts in perspective the theoretical and practical issues of the relationship of human rights to Islam. Anthony Chase argues against privileging Islam such that human rights must be warranted in Islamic terms in order to be seen as relevant. Islam, he insists, “is neither responsible for rights violations nor the core basis for advancing rights” (p. 21).

Islamism, as a religious nationalist ideology, Chase argues, has had a markedly negative effect on human rights throughout the Muslim world (p. 24). Chase does not make the essential point, however, that reformist Islamic movements have also given Muslim women new tools of empowerment and prominence in some Arab countries, such as Jordan, Kuwait, and Tunisia, to mention a few. Chase notes that political structures explain most human rights violations in the Arab world and that Arab leaders perpetrate political and religious pathologies. It is nevertheless essential to realize that these leaders have been the least faithful to Islam's own normative and ethical foundations. It is equally important to underscore the fact that Islamic grassroots organizations have created wide-ranging social welfare networks fulfilling socioeconomic needs of the masses in the face of government failure to do so.

Elaborating on the conditions surrounding the establishment of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), Bhey el-Din Hassan argues that the EOHR would undermine its own principles and integrity if it refused to defend Islamists' human rights (p. 44). The viability of human rights discourse has been further bolstered by the EOHR's stance among Egyptian human rights groups as it insists on maintaining a separation between the victims of rights violations and their ideological, political, and religious orientations (p. 48).

In the second section, Amr Hamzawy examines contemporary intellectual discourse in the Arab world by placing it in the context of globalization. Normative ideas—such as human rights, democracy, and rationalism—are gaining a central place in Islamist and reform-oriented discourses. This possibility is likely to allow space in which cultural change and continuity can coexist with positive global advances, such as protecting and promoting human rights (p. 63).

Neil Hicks applies Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink's “spiral model” of human socialization to elucidate the limits of this theory. He demonstrates that pushing the government on human rights has closed the discursive space, and undermined the domestic opposition and the spread of human rights discourse in Egypt (p. 86). The state remains unmoved and will engage in a domestic debate on human rights on its own terms, not those of nongovernmental organizations or transnational influences. The Egyptian state, Hicks continues, insists that human rights concerns will never trump the overriding strategic interests of the country's main Western allies (p. 88). Thus, local and international activists have to make the best of limited opportunities for cooperation with the government in the human rights domain.

Valentine Moghadam's essay demonstrates that a major difficulty facing women's rights activists lies in the tension between a national identity grounded in Islamic civilization and culture and the call for civil and political rights inspired by Western societies and traditions. In the context of equal citizenship rights for women, Moghadam points out that nationalism and Islamism remain the discursive frameworks that both shape and constrain the idea of human rights. Women's organizations need to develop a framework for recognizing identities and laying the foundation for equal rights for all in a way that draws on history, cultural understandings, and global standards (p. 104).

The book's third section addresses the present challenges facing the contemporary Arab human rights movements. Hanny Megally's essay is highly skeptical of local human rights movements in the Arab world. These movements, Megally argues, have been drawn more and more into activities at the international level, but have not endeared their organizations to their constituents back home (p. 110). Nicola Pratt lays out the limits to the successful operation of human rights activists in Egypt. Western nongovernmental organizations and their connection with the Egyptian civil society continue to be problematic. It is essential, Pratt argues, that “human rights activists attempt to overturn the binary oppositions that give meaning to the foreign funding debate, rather than reframe these oppositions or avoid them” (p. 125). Eyad El Sarraj explains the standard line in Palestine that human rights are Western tools used in particular by the United States to control Palestinians and Arabs. The American connection is often used to disregard the law and respect for human rights (p. 133).

The book's final section deals with case studies. Sheila Carapico's study of Yemeni ideas about human rights explains how concepts of human rights surfaced as intellectuals, jurists, and other political and cultural elites challenged tyranny and oppression significantly through reference to indigenous religious and societal values. These concepts have become deeply woven into Yemeni political culture and scholarship (p. 137). Increasingly, many Yemenis have searched their own intellectual heritage for legal, moral, and logical support for international conceptions of human rights. As a result, there has emerged a distinctly Arab engagement with international human rights in Yemen.

The following chapters by Tamir Moustafa (Egypt) and Susan Waltz and Lindsay Benstead (Morocco) show an interesting contrast between the two. Moustafa details how the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court has provided effective avenues for activists to challenge the state and how human rights groups and opposition parties have become increasingly adept at using judicial institutions to successfully challenge the regime (p. 172). Moustafa acknowledges the failure of litigation mechanisms, however, in the face of underdeveloped civil society and the lack of popular support to address human rights issues.

Waltz and Benstead argue that Morocco's human rights movement has made considerable strides. Domestic and transnational pressures—via the efforts of allies, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations—have unleashed a process of norm internalization within Moroccan human rights groups (p. 194). The recent legislative decisions regarding terrorism and emergency powers are emblematic of the limits to posing a serious threat to monarchical powers or the country's traditional bureaucratic elite (makhzan).

Amr Hamzawy's epilogue reemphasizes the book's normative paradigm by focusing on the actors and forces most intimately involved in the human rights debates (p. 197). On balance, the book invites engagement with the complexity of human rights in the Arab world, pioneering a perspective that challenges facile understanding of and simplistic assumptions about this region of the world. This volume substantially contributes to the literature of human rights in non-Western societies and provides a very useful source for anyone interested in understanding human rights conditions in the Arab world. Scholars and instructors exploring issues of culture, power, and human rights would particularly benefit from this volume.