What do human rights have to do with religion? According to the most common scholarly and activist narrative, not much. Human rights on this account emerged first out of an Enlightenment-centered effort to deal with the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then were institutionalized in a series of agreements, starting with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Religious groups were either marginal actors, unimportant to the growth of what Thomas Banchoff calls the “International Human Rights Regime,” or were obstacles to it, preferring to protect their institutional privileges rather than place themselves on an equal status with other groups, religious or otherwise. This interesting and well-conceived volume looks to add to what is a growing set of challenges to the standard narrative. Rather than being marginalized or simply opposed to human rights, religion has instead played an important role in their development; indeed, part of the point of these essays is to highlight an “alternative narrative” that explores how human rights discourses develop within religious communities, rather than merely outside of them (p. 5).

Most efforts along these lines are more interested in the philosophical grounds of human rights or their historical genesis or even the ways in which religious groups press for or against the adoption of certain rights standards in the international arena. This volume does something quite different, and it promises real payoffs in our understanding of the relation between religion and human rights. In assembling a group of country- and region-specific experts to look at the ways in which rights discourses have been put to use by religious groups in a wide variety of contexts, Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow give us a glimpse of what is an extraordinarily complex set of issues. The chapters are divided into three groups: one dealing with Islam specifically; another with religion in Latin America, Africa, and the majority-Buddhist areas of south Asia; and a final section exploring specific countries (India, China, Russia, and the United States). One can only hope that this is but the beginning of a much broader effort to examine systematically how religious communities employ the concept of human rights (or fail to) and what the effects are on their respective social and political orders.

The first substantive section consists of two essays touching on what is surely the most vivid set of issues on religion and human rights today, those surrounding Islam's relation to human rights. Both Robert Hefner's chapter on Indonesia and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad's on Islam and women's rights rightly acknowledge Islam's struggles with human rights as such, but both hold out hope that some kind of progress can be made. Hefner argues that the shift in global Muslim opinion toward supporting democracy and human rights and the general success of Indonesia's democratic government show that there are ways in which Islam can be reconciled to human rights. The trouble, as he also points out, is that relatively large majorities affirm the importance of human rights and democracy while also embracing the political enforcement of religiously defined virtue. The result is that we should not expect Muslim-majority countries to embrace what Haddad refers to as the “Western concept of human rights” (p. 73); rather, at their best, these countries will likely work out distinctive approaches to rights that take account of their continued attachment to public Islamic ethics.

In one sense, we should not find this surprising or worrying. No two democracies affirm precisely the same set of rights: The idea of human rights may be universalist and backed by international covenants, but the instantiation of rights is always local and always, it seems, structured by particular histories, culture, and, of course, politics. But if Haddad is right in her argument that Islamic resistance to human rights is at least partly a product of anticolonialist resentment, then we might also rightly worry that the Islamic model of “human rights” will not so much be a local instantiation of a universal set of principles but, rather, their wholesale rejection. Haddad herself seems a bit ambivalent about what a distinctively Islamic human rights regime might look like, especially as it touches on women, but she clearly hopes that what emerges will be both consonant with the culture's traditions and histories and recognizable as human rights. Both of these chapters certainly provide evidence in that direction but also suggest that it is far from a certainty, and in an age when Islam's political direction impacts politics globally, this is definitely a set of questions asking for more sustained attention.

The next set of essays deals with Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the majority-Buddhist parts of South Asia. Of these, the most interesting was Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf's chapter on the ways in which both Islamic and Christian religious authorities have been working to end the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Abusharaf shows how local and international activists have worked to recruit religious leaders from both communities to insist that the practice is not required by sacred texts or traditions but, in fact, runs afoul of them. What is especially interesting here, and it is reflected in Paul Freston's chapter on Latin America as well, is that the rapidly changing religious demographics and especially the expansion of Christianity and Islam in particular contexts may mean, quite contrary to the standard human rights narrative, new opportunities for expanded rights protections. In many cases, we might very well find religion and culture to be at odds with each other, as whole populations convert (or become revitalized in their religious beliefs and practices). Scholars and activists looking to understand the possibilities and limits of human rights must pay close attention to changes not just in religious practices or doctrine but in allegiances as well.

Finally, the volume takes up the specific case studies of India, China, Russia, and the United States. The latter three all look at the ways in which religion plays both a positive and negative role in the establishment (or expansion) of human rights protections, but it is Pratap Bhanu Mehta's essay on India that, perhaps unintentionally, raises questions for the whole volume. Mehta suggests that Hinduism had internal structures that made it especially receptive to Western claims in favor of democracy and human rights. But these structures meant that Hinduism could change in response to what he takes to be a fundamentally secular set of human rights claims. Human rights here are made out to be external to religion, and the best thing that might be said of religion is that it can sometimes adapt to and accept those claims.

That is just the old human rights narrative all over again, however, and it raises for me a question left still unresolved by the essays under review here. Will religion be a partner in the continued global dialogue about the rights and protections that are due to persons as such, as most of the essays here suggest? Or, as Mehta suggests, does religion matter for human rights only in that it responds well to an international legal and political regime rooted in a secular rationale? There is a wealth of reflection in these pages on this very question, and one can only hope that they will spur further research on what is undoubtedly a crucial issue for the politics of human rights around the world.